


Maybe I Will, Maybe I Won't

by Reginald_Magpie



Series: Any Failing Empire [1]
Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, Fall Out Boy, Fueled by Ramen, My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Demigods, Coffee Shops, Demigods, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Face Punching, Fraternities & Sororities, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, In which Ryan Ross is a bit of an asshole but he's really just trying to do the right thing, M/M, Marijuana, Pete Wentz doesn't even go here., Ryan Ross is an asshole who bums all his smokes from his friends., Slam Poetry, Smoking, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, Underage Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-20 19:51:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2440850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reginald_Magpie/pseuds/Reginald_Magpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ryan and Spencer left Las Vegas eight days ago and caught a greyhound into Utah, then just kept hitchhiking. (And Spencer's already met a Guy, capital G).<br/>Ryan just wants to see the ocean, he wants to be anywhere that isn't near Nevada, so when his dad kicked him out the day before his eighteenth birthday, he took his best friend, Spencer Smith, son of Zeus and the chubbiest, cutest, best friend he's ever had, and they headed for the hills.<br/>They didn't want to stay in Colorado long (just long enough to stock up on enough weed to get them through), but Ryan's never known a home, and when he meets Jon Walker, son of Hestia, who has the hearth in his veins, that might be enough to make them want to stay.<br/>But Colorado is about so much more than that. (It's about them maybe, actually, for real going to college, and living in a frat house!). And Ryan and Spencer are about to understand a lot more about the world than they ever did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I - All My Forgotten Poems (Are a Joke)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> edit (5/21/2016): 
> 
> This is it, this is the official first part of the first part of the rebooted version of AFE I'll be writing in the coming months; part two of "Maybe I Will, Maybe I Won't" will probably be edited and re-released within the next week.
> 
> This reboot will affect all existing published AFE canon, but won't change a lot of things plot-wise. This is just a process to get the series up to a point with editing that I feel comfortable finishing out the series. (Finishing this series is definitely going to happen.)

* * *

:verse:

feed your jewelry to the sea

* * *

Ryan knows things, he knows the curve at the inside of the thigh and he knows the way heartbeats flutter. He knows about bees, populations and descents, he knows how best to snub a cigarette and hide a hickey. 

What Ryan doesn’t know is open road and flying without wings. There is a demigod beside him, shoulder is baring into his, they’re leaned into each other in the back of a van which drove straight out of the eighties and has windows tinted so dark it’s hard to see out of them as the road rushes past them at three AM. There is a storm chasing them, like storms are want to do with this demigod, Ryan’s best friend. Ryan can feel the thunder in his bones like rolling waves as lightning brightens the van only a miniscule amount each time it flashes.

Ryan’s chest is storming, too. He’s watching the highway lines fall away under the rain, they tell him he’s leaving the closest thing he ever had to home, and that’s a mixed drink of almost equal parts terror and excitement. 

Spencer’s presence is comforting. These mountains make Ryan uneasy, although not necessarily for their presence so much as their height. He’s never felt comfortable on the kind of road that clings to a mountain closer than the trees decorating its hills do. 

Ryan doesn’t know the continental divide. He doesn’t know anything this side of it. And for once, Ryan, who’s become accustomed to knowing almost everything, feels out of place.

This is not a feeling that will stop. 

Spencer keeps glancing nervously at him in between conversing with the driver. Every time Spencer’s anxiety peaks the thunder crashes harder against the sky. 

The man driving the van isn’t as threatening as they thought he’d be when he pulled up beside them at the rest stop in Grand Junction two hours ago. They’d been walking I-70, hadn’t thought about where to stop for the night, hadn’t thought about stopping honestly. They hadn’t even been expecting anyone to stop for them either; they hadn’t been trying to catch a ride this time.

But he pulled over and offered them a ride and even though they couldn’t see his face something about his voice said he wasn’t going to hurt them and they were too tired to really think better of it. 

Spencer is less at ease with strangers than Ryan is. He can feel his friend’s tense nerves jumping his foot against the floor of the van. Ryan is too out of it to pay attention to what Spencer and the other guy are saying to each other until the driver’s offering them a bag of shake he has stashed in the console and Ryan’s guard is up but he’s interested. 

He tries to see the driver’s face through the rearview again, but he can’t with the deep shadow it’s cast in, even when the lightning comes. 

He squeezes Spencer’s knee as he takes the ziploc handed back to him, incredulous. Spencer tells him he doesn’t have to, he’s very polite, and he asks how far the van’s going and the answer is the name of a city Ryan doesn’t even recognize. Electricity crackles around the car.

They pass Denver three hours into the drive, and the sky is starting to turn the color of an almost-ripe peach cut to the pit around the sun sitting just below the eastern horizon. The buildings glitter, backlit, and Ryan feels trapped. He taps Spencer’s knee, nonverbally asks to bail the trip. Spencer shakes his head, and Ryan trusts Spencer’s trust more than his own. His has always been flawed. He almost relaxes, but the storm rages on and he knows Spencer isn’t as calm as he’s letting on.

The next hour and a half goes fast. Ryan gives into the slight buzz he still has going from Grand Junction as best as he can. The man drops them off at a motel without incident and Ryan crashes as soon as he’s gotten inside the room. He vaguely remembers waking up around noon to Spencer opening and closing a door and drifts back to sleep to the sound of sparrows half-whispering from the window sil. The rain follows them, whispering alongside them. 

Ryan knows things, and he knows how to make his life small, how to exist in the moments between sleep just begging to do it again, begging to be nothing at all. He understands the intricate nature of living without really living, and hotels are the epitome of that art. He’s felt more at home in them than the house he grew up in since he was young. For the next days, the hotel room becomes Ryan’s base of operations. He talks with the sparrows at the window, and swims in the half-clean pool, and locks himself inside reading local papers and writing in spiral bound notebooks he took from home and trying to understand why Spencer comes home every day from wherever he goes with stars in his eyes.

The strangers in this little mountain town already sit wrong with Ryan, something about how almost all of them have the same spark of divinity that Spencer has, he feels like he’s walking between the pillars of a great greek temple, not like he’s passing people on the paths outside the motel. 

They sit more wrong when he finds out why, and why Spencer seems starstruck.

 

Ryan almost spits coffee across the already-stained motel 6 sheets and the local paper in his right hand. He’s no longer skimming articles about local celebrity scandal, his eyes are fully fixed on Spencer.

“We’re not staying here because you met some guy. That’s the opposite of stopping when we’ve got a good reason, Spence, please, don’t do this right now,” he says, he’s trying to tear his eyes away, look aloofly off to the side. It’s not working. He’s a little too appalled by  Spencer’s proposition. 

Spencer gives him a sheepish smile and a nervous laugh and crosses his legs on the coffee table, slumping a little more in the faded recliner. 

“Then how’s this?” he answers, “We’re nearly out of money, nearly out of shake, and we’re already almost a thousand miles from home-” Spencer catches himself there (they’ve talked about it before; calling the house where Ryan lived until last Monday ‘home’—, “almost a thousand miles from what used to be a vague approximation of home.”

Ryan continues to stare at him incredulously. That didn’t stop them in St George. It didn’t stop them in Grand Junction. They’ve dealt with running out of things before. They made this trip on eighty bucks between the two of them, and for the 812 -  _ Ryan’s been counting even if Spencer wants to hyperbolize _ \- miles Ryan’s pretty sure they’ve got what they paid for, and he’s willing to keep pushing it to put a few more miles of road between him and Las Vegas. At the back of his mind there’s still the tickling want to keep going til they run out of road. Try to make it all the way to the east coast. They could go to Europe and they still wouldn’t be far enough away in Ryan’s opinion.

“We should have gone West,” is what Ryan says, because he knows it’s more realistic, “I want to see the ocean. We could still go to the Gulf..”

Spencer frowns at the speckled grey carpet. Ryan watches thoughts cross his eyes.

“The Gulf? Like Texas?,” he says after a few seconds of dead, still silence,  “Where we would just fit in perfectly. How would we even get there?”

“Ryan,” he adds before Ryan can come up with a good answer to his question, “We haven’t slept in a real bed since we left, you haven’t been sober in weeks, if nothing else you’re exhausted, you’re not thinking straight. Just come meet this guy. He’s got an extra room, two is what he said.”

“We don’t need two rooms. I just want to get away, Spencer, please, we can hitchhike to the east coast, come on, please,” Ryan returns They both know he’s losing this argument. They both know that he always does, in these situations. Spencer is level headed enough for both of them on most counts and it seems he always has a way of finding the surest of paths despite almost always being in over his head. At almost eighteen he’s probably the wisest, bravest person Ryan’s ever known. 

And now, for the first time in years Ryan wonders if he could keep going without Spencer. If he could strike out on his own. He just wants to see the ocean but Spence is right, he’s tired. He’s tired of it all and he just wants something to go his way for once. Of course it won’t. He swallows the thought with a little repulsion at himself for even thinking of leaving Spencer here. In the gap between the uneven curtains, a drizzling downpour starts reminiscent of the rain the desert gets when it neither expected nor prayed for rain, starting off slow and growing in intensity without anyone noticing. Ryan tries not to think about drowning.

“He’s like me, Ryan,” Spencer says it with the kind of relief and honest pleading Ryan knows is rare nowadays. Ryan almost lets that stop him from snapping at him. Almost.

“Oh, a bastard child of Zeus? Not like he doesn’t fuck like a rabbit, I’m sure we’ll find five more next town over,” the bile rising in the words burns off quick and by the time he’s run through the sentences Ryan’s burnt out on the resentment fueling them. He knows they won’t find another demigod in the next three hundred miles. He knows Spencer has only met maybe a dozen like him in his lifetime, all briefly. None meaningful. He lacks a connection to an integral part of himself. Ryan knows this will mean the world to his best friend. And that means he has to do it. He gives Spencer the defeated look Spence knows well. Most days Spencer would argue with him til he actually verbally conceded. Ryan is relieved when Spencer makes it quite clear this isn’t ‘most days’ by standing up and folding the paper under Ryan’s fingers before putting it on the chipped, wobbly table and settling down next to Ryan with his shoes still on. 

Before Ryan can say anything Spencer is wrapping an arm around his shoulder, his hand resting at the back of his head and pushing his face into Spencer’s chest and Ryan can’t even fight it. His fingers catch and hold in Spencer’s shirt. 

“He’s a good guy,” he mumbles, trying to soften the blow, Ryan knows, “He’s not one of Zeus’ kids.” The concern in Spencer’s voice should be comforting but it’s really just tiring.

“Whose is he?” Ryan tries to sound like he’s interested while he lets Spencer’s smell take him into that little corner of his brain. It swirled. He slides a little closer, pressing his mouth into Spencer’s shoulder. He lets the feeling of cotton against his lips swell in his gut. The bowl he smoked three hours ago is dragging him down now, he can feel the waves of tiredness crashing over his head.

“I don’t think he said.” Spencer’s  hand starts working through Ryan’s hair.

“If you’re tired, you should sleep,” he adds. The hand slides down Ryan’s back, “We can talk about this tomorrow.”

The sparrow made of discomfort settles restlessly into his diaphragm. Before he knows it, he’s asleep. He gives in to his best friend’s warmth even if his friend can’t say any of the right things right now. The ocean slips against itself in his head. The waves give themselves to foam. 

  
  


When Ryan comes to, everything is sharp and crisp against the cool late summer morning of Colorado Springs. His head pounds. There’s a vague feeling of dread still lingering from whatever dream he can’t remember now, it pools in his stomach. Spencer’s hand is on his shoulder.  Which is confounding because Ryan’s pretty sure they were pressed into each other when he fell asleep. There is a cold absence beside him. He doesn’t think about it too hard.

He fumbles fingers across the bedside table to the little white cardboard box, experienced hands flipping the side open. He doesn’t see but he hears his fingers sliding the sleeve out of the box, lets the pad of his thumb probe the mostly-perforated foil on one side of the sleeve. His thumb nail found the second-to-last untouched pocket and was running the perimeter when a hand found his wrist. Slowly he starts to register what’s happening. Spencer isn’t there. 

“Slow down, bud,” a voice is warning, a hand which Ryan thought was Spencer’s but is definitely not pulls his wrist back as soon as he drops the pills. Ryan blinks his eyes open fully, his head pounds with the light streaming through the threadbare curtains. Anxiety ripples through his sternum and stomach.

“Who-?” Ryan starts, his voice is a croak. The man sitting on his bed is unfamiliar, dark straightened haired, with eyes the exact color of dark creme de cacao. They’re ringed in day-old eyeliner and the circles under them say he hasn’t slept. He smells a little like tobacco and his mouth is a little too big for his face. Ryan shrinks away from his hand, eyes wide as he swallows mild terror and tries to keep his face composed. Crazy homeless people wandering into his motel room will probably react poorly to his being scared of them, he thinks.

(Are they anything besides crazy homeless people wandering in and out of motels, though? The only difference is they’ve paid for the rooms.)

“Hey. I’m not here to, like, hurt you. You were having a pretty horrible dream,” the stranger attempts to soothe.

Ryan gives him an incredulous stare. It's the worst cop out he’s heard in a long time.

“It might sound kind of crazy since you’re obviously not from around here--”

“How do you know I’m not from around here?” Ryan cuts in, overly-suspicious edge to his voice sharp against the guy’s laid back tone.

“You’re sleeping in a motel,” he points out.

“So?”

He snorts, meeting Ryan’s glare with a softer look. “I’m here to talk to Spencer.”

“Anything you can say to Spencer you can say to me,” Ryan fires back, deciding that the best attitude to go into this with is an aggressive one because it’s who knows how early in the morning and this guy  _ probably  _ isn’t armed.  Whatever walls the stranger had danced around momentarily come crashing back down. Ryan is a smooth-faced stone. He thinks of nothing.

The guy looks at him for a really long minute  and shakes his head, finally. “I was just going to invite him to a little weekly get together we have off campus near here. It’s for divinity’s children, though. Humans uh, aren’t allowed to attend unless we make special permissions.”

“You mean demigods?” Ryan makes a note to ask what campus this guy is from and to what ‘we’ he’s referring. Not because he’s interested, of course. 

“Yeah, I guess. A lot of people prefer divinity’s children. It’s politically correct or something.”

It only takes a moment for Ryan to realize he’s going to lie. The moment directly coincides with him opening his mouth to do so. 

“I’m one of you,” he replies, “Like Spence. Zeus’ kid.”

Eyeliner quirks his eyebrow and gets this confused-concerned look not unlike a dog’s when it’s been told to do something it doesn’t quite know how to do.. He nods after a minute, though, in a way that seems more ‘seems legit’ than caught up thinking something, and scribbles an address, time, and day on the newspaper tossed onto the tiny coffee table. 

“Tell Spencer I stopped by, okay? And keep an eye on him, Brendon’s pretty worried about you guys for some reason. Anyway, I’ve got some stuff to do back home,” the tone in his voice says he’s not actually going home. Ryan suspects this guy spends more time in other peoples’ beds than his own.  The bed shifts and squeaks and he’s up, a rustle by Ryan’s head and a little rummage sound, he turns his head to watch the guy’s receding back, only noticing he’s taken the box of rohypnol when he’s already out the door. Ryan groans, but shakes his head. He drags himself from bed and closes the door behind Eyeliner. 

He calls Spencer, who doesn’t answer. Which isn’t rare. Neither of them are great at paying for service when there’re other more important things to pay for and the only people they need to call are usually each other. And they’re usually together. He scrounges through the sandwich bags they keep in a little lightning bolt pencil case Spencer’s had since elementary school, and the grinder, but decides to wait until Spencer’s back from, wherever he went, to smoke the last of what they have.

Ryan thinks about leaving the hotel room. He hasn’t since Spencer went out yesterday morning. He’s starting to feel tired and empty, though, like running and moving and thinking is too much work. He tries to think of where he could go. What he could do. Which is when he finds the worst solution he possibly can short of literally buying methamphetamine from the guy on the corner and killing like five people or something.

(Ryan is known for his poorest decisions when he’s sober. It’s like the second he’s got enough clarity to figure out how to destroy himself, he does that. It’s one of the only facts which seems to keep Spencer from trying to get him sober (funny considering Spencer’s usually worse, he’s the one who gets jitters the second he comes down, it’s Spencer’s jonesing that pushes them to the next dealer almost always.))

First he puts on real clothes, not the washed out Beatles shirt that’s three sizes too big for him and the thrice-worn skinny jeans he fell asleep in. Clean, neat clothes. He doesn’t want to look like the homeless vagrant he is. He walks half an hour to a library. He researches colleges in the area. He makes a call to the office of one that seems promising, gets the information he needs, and bums a long white cigarette from a couple lingering outside the library doors before he makes his second call. He regrets dialing the number he’s had memorized since he was eight the second the ringer starts.

The ringer can’t last long enough.

It lasts four sweet, merciful rings before Ryan hears the voice of the devil on the other line.

“Hello?” the voice on the other line answers like he hasn’t gotten caller ID yet, Ryan’s body goes tight, taut like a deer in the crosshairs. Ice shoots through his veins. If running wasn’t pointless before, it is now. Fight or flight, fight’s the only option. The ocean is going through a drought, he’s never going to see it again.

“I need some money.” He doesn’t bother saying hello in return. Ryan knows what’s coming before it comes. He doesn’t understand why he’s going so far to back up a lie he told a stranger. (Something about moths to flames, alarm bells ringing have always been the best backbeat to a heartbeat.)

“Are you fucking serious,” it’s not a question, the slur between ‘fucking’ and ‘serious’ is more telling than the content of the sentence. 

“College.”

“What?” 

“I want to go to college. You and mom never did right?”

“Your mother was a slut.”

There’s a long, long pause on the other end of the line, pocketed in Ryan’s silence. Ryan can see his father’s brain warring between being a nurturing parent and being a penny-pinching drunk. He knows it’s a slim chance being a parent will win out. The uneven ceiling fan of the apartment Ryan grew up in whirs away unevenly in the background of the call. A television is on the background. Checking the day on the computer in front of him tells him it’s probably a football game. He can imagine the fan wobbling dangerously close to the popcorn ceiling where it sags in against the tightly packed space.

“How much?” 

Ryan swallows. He feels the wad of anxiety in his throat lodged above his adam’s apple. This is not what he was prepared to hear.

“Six a semester for non residents. It’s reasonable?” The tiny bit of hope pushes his voice up half an octave at the end.

There’s another long pause.. A high-pitched squeal and following grunt-groan in the background tells him football probably isn’t what’s playing on the screen in the living room. Ryan’s glad his father’s enjoying his privacy, he tries to tell himself. 

“You’re a disappointin’ fag who I’m not going to drop another six thou on. I don’t know why you called kiddo. You made it pretty clear ydon’t want nothing to do with me ‘n’ that’s fine you’re not welcome here anymore anyway, but do everyone a favor and call Spencer’s mother. Miss Smith wants to know where her son is.” With that, the line goes dead. Any hope Ryan had flickers and dies with it. Dread floods in to replace it. He feels a thousand times heavier. 

He doesn’t want to walk back to the motel. He doesn’t want to be sober. He doesn’t want the cloying awareness of pain and emptiness. Ryan doesn’t even bother closing the browser which is proudly displaying a page with tuition information for Garden of the Gods Institute, he lifts himself from the seat and shoves himself away from the desk with all the repulsion he can muster. 

He hitchhikes back to the motel with a man and his two husky-bloodhound mutts. The tiredness echoes through his bones.

 

Spencer’s worried sick by the time Ryan drags himself back to the motel and falls into him. Ryan just shakes his head and holds on, pulling the warmth off his friend, trying to hide in it, make himself feel happy and safe again. 

“You need to go home, Spencer,” he mumbles, pressing his face into the fabric of Spencer’s shirt, breathing him in, feeling his lips stick to the cotton as he talks, he doesn’t want to think about this and the dread knots in his stomach but something says he has to say it. 

“What?”

“You need to go home,” he pulls his face away just long enough to say it unmuffled.

“I understood, why? Why do I need to go back, Ry?” his voice is quiet. Ryan can imagine his face. Worry lines it like the shadows on a cloud, pooling at his brow and in the corners of his mouth. Ryan feels bad for half a moment. 

“Your mom’s worried about you. You’re still a minor for a little longer, Spence, she could report you as a runaway.”

Ryan can’t see Spencer’s face changing, but he can feel the affection and care drain away from his touch. His hands go cold and hard as they pull Ryan away from his chest. He looks straight into him with dark pupils and the angriest eyes Ryan’s seen on Spencer for a long time.

“You called her?”

“No,” Ryan says, looking levelly back into Spencer’s eyes with an equally piercing look, his almost-pensive. Deathly calm. He knows what he’s doing.

“How do you know she’s worried then?” Spencer’s not buying it. Ryan can tell that much.

“I called my dad,” Ryan doesn’t let his voice waver. For the second time in as many seconds Spencer’s face changes. The anger mostly drains away, his eyebrows drawing up into concern and confusion, where Ryan won’t let his lips quiver, Spencer’s do it for him. He rubs little circles where his hands gripped to drag Ryan away from himself. The fabric runs warm and rough against his skin, leaves its traces.

“Why?”

“Because you seemed serious about wanting to stay here. There’s a college for you here. There’s a house. With a room for you. And an apparently ‘gorgeous’ guy. It’s fucking perfect for you here and I wanted to be here too. I want to be where you are. But there’s no way I could go to that college with you even if I was one of you and there’s no way--- I just.”

“Ryan, stop.” Spencer gently tugs him close again, taking them both back the few steps toward the bed. They stand there in silence for a second. 

“What college? Who says I even want to go to college? I didn’t even walk for graduation. Can’t we make those plans later?”

“No,” Ryan mumbles into Spencer’s hair. His hands find his sides, then snake around his back, hugging tight, “You have to go back. So do I. I go where you go.”

“No.” Spencer echoes, pulling out from under Ryan’s chin and tries to look him straight in the eye but he’s being held too close and low so he ends up kind of staring at Ryan’s chin before he flops them both back onto the bed. 

“I’m not letting you go back to that scumbag. Give me your phone,” Spencer says, and he’s smiling in that nervous Spencer way that’s just asking “is it okay if I try to cheer you up? Will you be offended?” It makes Ryan’s stomach warm. When he doesn’t give Spencer his phone, Spencer proceeds to shove a hand into his back pocket to fish it out. 

“Hey!” Ryan squeaks (he’d meant it to come out as more laid back, but it’s a little shaky due to the fact his best friend’s groping his ass and that’s like groping your own ass.) and swats at Spencer’s hand, but he’s laughing and Spencer’s hooting by the time he’s rested Ryan’s phone from him and is rolling across the grimy bedspread. Sunlight stripes the bed and off-grey carpet through the crack in the curtains.

“Give that back! What are you doing?”

Spencer doesn’t answer just smirks over the phone. It only takes a minute for him to do whatever he did and toss the phone back. 

“What did you do?” Ryan insists.

“Just a favor.  You’ll thank me later. You know what else you’ll thank me for?” Spencer’s smirk warms.

“What?

“Figuring out how cheap weed is in Colorado.” He rolls off the bed, landing with a gentle thud and scurrying over to his satchel, out of which he pulls a mason jar which he holds up victoriously on his knees. 

“You look like you’re trying to do Lion King with a jar of weed, Spencer.”

* * *

:chorus:

went out to a graveyard to bum a couple flowers (to give to you)

* * *

 

When Ryan finally meets the guy with whom they’re supposedly going to be staying, it’s been a day and a half and they’re running out of food and cash and going to dinner at this mystery guy’s house couldn’t come quick enough. Ryan’s seriously considering selling his mp3 player. He sold his guitar back in St George.

They hitchhike part of the way and walk the rest. It’s not far to the guy’s house. He’s just off campus, which is just off the main public ‘Garden of the Gods’ park. Luckily for them, he’s on the side of Campus closer to the greater Colorado Springs metro area.

When they find the address both Ryan and Spencer have to double check that this is the right place. Then Ryan’s staring at Spencer.

“He was shitting you.”

“Yeah,” Spencer slowly concedes, “Maybe he was.” 

Spencer starts walking up the long driveway to the immense, sprawling building before them, leaving Ryan behind to stare. It’s two stories, probably, one if there’s a large attic or loft like the small windows at the roof’s peak suggest, and probably a basement, but it takes up what would be almost a block if measured longways, and it’s on a piece of property big enough to pull it out from the street by a driveway long enough to leave an already somewhat tired Ryan winded and out of breath by reaching the front door. Spencer is too busy examining the perfectly tended to lilies (all white, all the flowers on the property are white, Ryan notices) lining the house and each window box to announce their presence so Ryan steps up to the door. A strange bird sounds in the backyard, walled off from the front with large stone walls broken into pillars at the house’s front entryway. The path up to the door, like the driveway, is paved in white and rose stone. 

There doesn’t seem to be a doorbell but there’s a large cast iron knocker in the shape of a cobra, above it a small plaque with a pictogram of a tiny flare-necked cobra followed by an eta and a phi, under it an ornate carving of a peacock. 

Ryan knocks.

There’s a shout inside, unintelligible, then a probably-female voice saying “not me, I always get it make Nate get it.” and a “What? ugh.” in response. Finally, footfalls and the door swinging open to a kid who can’t be a day over twelve. 

“Who let you out of school this early?” Ryan asks, smirking down at the mop of dark hair covering the kid’s eyes. He glares right back through it, Ryan can feel it and smirks, which is when what Spencer has deemed the ‘Infallible Law of George Ryan Ross’ takes over. (Which is kind of what Ryan is counting on)

(The Infallible Law reads something like ‘if you meet Ryan, there’s a 90% chance of being inexplicably attracted to him on an aesthetic, platonic, or sexual level in one of the most intense ways you’ve ever felt’. Ryan doesn’t understand it (he doesn’t find himself very likeable at all), but he cashes in on it quite a bit.)

The kid grins, cheeks going a warm shade of strawberry. “You’re funny. Are you here to see Gabe?” 

Spencer peers over Ryan’s shoulder.

“Brendon, actually.” 

“You’re funny too. Unless you’re Pete and Patrick with some sort of illusion….” The kid proceeds to reach up and plant his palm squarely in the center of Spencer’s face. Which earns a little muffled snort of laughter from Ryan and a massive flinch from Spencer.

Then there’s a girl standing just behind the kid and she has to be about fifteen if that, she has petite, angular features and steely eyes strong enough to make Ryan look down and away the second they meet his. 

“Sorry for Nate. I’m Victoria. Brendon should be up in his room. I’ll go get him, you can hang out on the patio, I think Alex wanted to do dinner out there tonight.” Victoria gives a wide, warm smile that says the steely look was a misread default. (Although Ryan knows better than to assume she couldn’t fuck his day up. It’s maybe just because he’s still a little scared of teenage girls.)

“I’m Spencer,” Spencer moves forward to shake her hand and then Nate’s, “and this is Ryan. He being introduced though.” Spencer smirks over at Ryan who rolls his eyes and shakes their hands in turn. As soon as they’re through the door they’re greeted by a vaguely appetizing curry smell that makes Ryan want to sit down in the foyer of the mansion on the soft white shag and never move.

Nate takes them down the left bend in the hallway while Victoria disappears down the right bend. As soon as they take a right into a larger room with a TV and a few couches as well as more beanbags than Ryan’s ever seen in one place, Nate starts talking. 

“This is Lounge 2, anyone can come in here,” he points to the ashtray on the arm of the closest couch, “If you smoke in here use the damn ashtray. Same goes for anywhere inside, no smoking in the kitchen, dining room, or greenhouse. Brendon doesn’t want booze upstairs, happens anyway though. Um. Also try not to break anything, downstairs it doesn’t matter so much since I think Gabe expects it but Bren doesn’t want anything too obviously messed up if possible, you know?”

He opens the sliding glass door out to the partially covered (and immense) patio and Ryan stops listening because he’s staring at the view. Off to the right, the red stone  crests of Garden of the Gods scrape open the sky, before them, the rocky mountain continental divide breaks it into a jagged edge, holding it open like a wound, bleeding what looks like cloud (but must be snow) down the highest peaks. Again and again, Ryan is amazed by the divide ripping the only soil he’s known in two. 

Spencer’s flabbergasted by the sight, too, and Nate just seems amused. 

“Anyway, I’m gonna go help Alex,” he says, “If any of the peacocks come up on the deck shove them off with your foot. They’re dumb and not supposed to be up here. Thanks, have fun!”

“Wait, did he say…?” Ryan’s saying as Nate is leaving when he spots one across the lawn, settling down under a pine tree and vigorously shaking its wings for some reason. 

“Peacocks,” Spencer murmurs, pointing at another at the corner of the patio, that one has a huge green and blue and violet tail. 

And then there’s a young man standing in the doorway who has to be just around Spencer’s age, with a mess of brown hair and a full-mouth almost-lopsided smile. He’s wearing clothes straight off the stage of a period play. Ryan fucking loves it.

“Spencer!” he’s saying and Spencer’s lighting up and Ryan takes a step back. It’s rare Spencer gets someone more interested in talking to him than the Infallible Law Stricken best friend he chooses to spend his time with, Ryan will let him have those moments. He ducks his head and lets his gaze skirt the mountains again while Spencer’s chirping a ‘hello Brendon’ and a ‘wow this place is a lot bigger than I expected’.

“I told you my place was huge. We’ve got like, tons of extra rooms but you’ve gotta grab them before the fraternity moves in all the way.” Everything he says he says with a flourish of his hands and eyebrows. Every breath is half-theatrical. He commands an audience. It’s weird, a charisma to rival Ryan’s. Something sits cold in his stomach about it.

“This is your place? Where are your parents? How old are you really?” Spencer inquires, eyes so fixed on Brendon they don’t even cast a whisper of a glance Ryan’s way. Ryan smiles a little feeble half smile.

“I’m eighteen. Got legally emancipated last year, though, my mom pulled some strings and my dad was all for it since I graduated and wanted to come to college out here. My dad’s in Vegas, still, my mom’s probably doing fuck all on Olympus, seems to be her MO, gods I hope she didn’t hear that. She technically owns the place but she checks in like, once every three months to make sure I haven’t destroyed it and then she leaves again.” 

It hits Ryan that this is probably one of the first times Spencer’s heard someone talk so openly about godly lineage. He looks at Spencer, who’s hanging on Brendon’s words like the sails on still seas and fights the urge to shake his head.

He wonders silently if Spencer has thought about staying here, and figured out there’s a college only for demigods here. He wonders if this place will definitely one hundred percent steal Spencer. He wonders if the mountains will take his best friend from him.

Spencer is opening his mouth to reply to Brendon (inevitably do the polite thing that doesn’t even cross Ryan’s mind and discuss the fact they’re seemingly all from Vegas) when Brendon’s eyes flick past him to Ryan. Ryan’s struck frozen while he’s examined and Brendon’s huge grin remains. There’s a sinking feeling in his stomach. 

“You didn’t tell me your boyfriend was pretty. Gonna have to protect him from the frat guys, huh?”

“Friend,” Spencer’s delay in them saying it simultaneously makes the correction sound a little echoed, but they both say it with the conviction and exasperation of people both certain that what they’re saying is a fact, and sick of having to explain to people that, yes, they really are ‘Just Friends (™)’. 

Brendon chuckles, shaking his head. 

“Okay, okay. So let’s talk.” He sits at one of the three tables on the porch, lacing his fingers and looking at the two of them. Ryan sits across from them first, looking at Spencer, who nervously shifts one foot to the other before sitting down and crossing his legs so he can rest the toe of his shoe against Ryan’s knee to stabilize his anxiety a little. Ryan’s fingertips find his ankle gently. He tries to send warmth and comfort through it as best he can. 

“We don’t have much money for rent, if you give us a month we can probably both find jobs,” Ryan says, grimacing a little in the awkward smile he gives Brendon, he doesn’t enjoy the concept of laying his weaknesses out for a near-stranger to see. Brendon only shakes his head and chuckles though. 

“I don’t want anything for the rooms. I don’t pay for the house, mom takes care of everything and Gabe’s insisting the frat’s going to pay a reduced rent and that they’ll cook and get groceries for letting them stay so I’ll probably be getting more money out of the house than I’ll know what to do with.” His eyes are so genuine it’s refreshing, but they cloud after a moment. Everything about him is a dichotomy of attractive and repulsive to Ryan, his smile makes him sick in the kind of way looking at the sky and feeling empty makes him sick. It’s hunger and the lack thereof rolled into one. Ryan doesn’t understand

“I’m just concerned uh. I just want to make sure this is the right place for you. It might be loud at night, and Gabe’s uh… He’s Dionysus’ kid and I think the love of party definitely carries over generationally. Not to mention there will probably be booze around.We try to keep hard drugs out of the building for the most part. We’ve got a couple recovering addicts moving in here in a couple weeks. We’re gay-friendly and progressive for the most part, and uh, a couple of us have had some serious issues with the ‘shove our traditionalist approach to everything down your throat’ lifestyle so if you’re like that this might not be the place for you. I don’t really think that’s you guys though.” Brendon looks legitimately anxious and Spencer laughs.  

Ryan stays quiet. He isn’t really focusing the way he should, his brain isn’t connecting. It just happens sometimes. He thinks vaguely about the future, about Spencer’s withdrawals. The last weeks before the end, before they had to go.  He doesn’t want to go through seeing his friend like that again. The lesser of two evils? Probably not. The less painful of two evils? Certainly.

“You’re good. I don’t think Ryan or I are anything traditional,” Spencer says with a sly kind of abashedness only he can ever really do, no matter how much Ryan tries to mimic it.

Ryan laughs a little, nodding and trying to break the almost-awkward look both Brendon and Spencer have adopted. 

“Yeah. Okay, so here’s the hard bit…” Brendon completely bashes any hope of getting Spencer back from the anxiety seeping into him. Ryan rubs his ankle, attempting to comfort. 

“I know you two are here because Ryan’s a runaway-”

“Throwaway,” Ryan corrects, “Throwaway is the term you use when you’ve got no choice to leave.” Spencer throws him a warning look. 

“Ryan’s a throwaway, wow that sounds fucking horrible. But you two, are you both over eighteen? Do your parents know where you are? Are you both demigods or are you human, Ryan? Do you have outstanding warrants? Anything I need to seriously know about you before you come into my house?”

Spencer goes pale and it’s his turn to go silent, so Ryan answers for him.

“Spencer’s seventeen,” Ryan pauses, considering what to say, considering perpetuating the lie or letting it slip by. 

“I’m one of you, same as Spencer,” he settles on (he thinks about how much this lie is going to take to upkeep but something tells him to ignore that), and he squeezes Spence’s ankle to make sure he doesn’t say anything. The hint is taken but Spencer gives him that guarded puzzled look he gives when he knows Ryan’s stretching the truth. He starts talking again before Brendon can open his mouth to catch him in it. 

“I was arrested for shoplifting when I was like fourteen, no charges, never been arrested since, he hasn’t been arrested either,” Ryan says, gesturing at his friend and then dropping his hands into his lap, “No contagious diseases, a--”

“I’m going to stop you there,” Brendon cuts in, brows furrowed, “You do know I could be charged for harboring a runaway, right?”

“That’s bullshit,” Spencer contributes, while Ryan thinks for a long moment.

“What if we enrolled him in college? What if we gave him a reason to be here? Got his mom’s permission and all? I mean it’s supposed to be easy to get into, right? Ridiculously easy. God kids just get handed a free diploma,” he’s saying without even thinking because even if he wants to see the ocean, he wants to see Spencer happy more, and he knows one of the things Spencer’s hated himself most over in life  is this; is being different. And this is where the Different people are. This is where Spencer belongs.

Brendon thinks about it, then looks straight at Spencer. 

“Would your mom buy that? Would she be okay with you leaving for college? We can call your dad about the money.”

Spencer’s nervous, but he swallows it, Ryan watches. 

“I think I could talk my mom into it. I don’t know how to get loans, though, and I’ve never talked to my dad.” Ryan leans his knee into Spencer’s toe at the little falter in his voice at the last admission. It’s something they sympathize with each other for. One of the things that they’ve held each other together for over the years. Absent parents,  _ flooded lungs. _ When they met, they joked in the way kids joke, about Ryan’s dad marrying Spencer’s mom. About how maybe their absent parents ran off with each other. Then it clarified, over the years, the fact that Spencer’s father was something great, something more than human, and that Ryan’s mother had just left. There had never been anything special about the whore his father told stories about if he was drunk enough. 

Brendon nods. His expression is lightening. Ryan tries not to let the glimmer of hope at the corner of his stomach get more than a tiny moment. ‘This could work’ repeats only once in his head after he thinks it the first time and it’s a quiet, reverent repeating in the back of his mind. 

“Then he owes you something, huh? Do you know how to talk to him?” 

Spencer’s brow furrows.

“No?” 

Brendon laughs, and all the tense muscles relax. He’s a dog who’s gone from  anxious about the strangers at his home table to an old labrador playing with puppies. He pulls himself to standing all loose limbs and relaxed movement. 

“You two don’t know anything you’re getting into. You don’t know anything about the world, huh?”

Ryan prickles a little at that, he’s leaning forward to defend himself and Spencer and it’s Spencer’s turn to rest a soothing hand on him (his knee) and remind him of their better interest. Ryan contents himself with openly staring at Brendon. 

“Oh stop it. It’s a good thing. You two know nothing about any of this and it’s okay because you seem like good people and I think you’ll fit in. We’ll teach you up, grasshoppers. This place is gonna be a home for you one day, just you wait.” Brendon strolls over to the peacock who’s decided to roost on the steps of the patio. It makes a sound that starts off as a squawk and ends as some sort of screaming laugh and Brendon’s voice gives away that he’s rolling his eyes at it.

“Really? That’s your excuse? Off.” He slow-motion nudges it with his foot, hard enough to dislodge it and make it flap its wings a couple times to give itself a clean landing but not hard enough to harm the bird.

It makes a sound of displeasure and Brendon laughs. Ryan swallows the feeling in his throat. Brendon then takes a few steps down to the lawn and then takes off running. 

Spencer and Ryan’s eyes meet and they share a confused look before both turning to watch him go to examine what looks like a post in the yard for a second and then run back. He looks at them with a grin on his face and drops a hand into his pocket to fish out a pack of Camel filters. He rummages in his pockets for a minute then looks at them. 

“Alright, looks like we’ve got enough time to make a quick call to your dad, either of you got a light?” 

Spencer’s face lights up. Ryan knows that’s his favorite question. He holds his hand out like he’s holding a lighter and Brendon cocks his hand but leans in and holds his cigarette close to Spencer’s hand. Spencer flicks his thumb down and a few sparks fly from where his hand is cupped around itself. They ignite and a cherry begins smoldering at the cigarette’s tip. 

Brendon looks confused and thrilled at the same time. 

“That’s such a neat trick, you gotta teach the Zeus kids around here that one!”

Ryan shakes his head and snorts, he meets Brendon’s eyes with a smirk.

“It gets old after the fifth time in a row he does it at a bus stop where everyone’s ten times more thrilled about it than you are.”

Brendon smirks, holding back a chuckle, and Ryan decides he likes the look of ‘trying not to laugh’ on Brendon. The glow in his chest that fills the whole world is almost there. Ryan misses it.

The flicker is gone as Brendon moves to the door. 

“Alex!” he bellows inside.

“Busy!” a very faint reply bellows back.

“Alex!” Brendon repeats

“Still busy!” the voice, presumably Alex, insists.

“Alex! Did Gabe drink all the offering wine or did we get more?”

“Ask him yourself!” There are footsteps and in a few moments a scruff-faced man is standing in the door. He looks like the type of person who would wear a casual grin at all occasions, but his brows are knit and he’s smacking the handle of a wooden spoon against his hip which is covered in what smells like that curry. He’s in street clothes covered by what obviously used to be a white apron but is now a splotchy off-white-and-greybrown color. He smacks Brendon in the shoulder with the spoon, leaving yellow remnants on the fabric. 

“Don’t talk to me while I’m cooking for what could be five or could be fucking thirty people, Urie.  Seriously, go ask Gabe. Don’t pout at me, now.”

Once Brendon’s been stared at long enough to realize Alex is serious and he actually scurries inside, Alex turns  to Spencer and Ryan. He gives them a jovial smile that fits his face much better.

“Hello! Great to meet you, I’d love to talk, but I’ve got, like, twenty ‘maybes’ for tonight and I needa go pull my hair out a bit more. I’ll meet you better over dinner.” And with that he turns on his heel and is gone without a single drip on the carpet. (Gabe will later tell them that one can tell how hammered Suave Suarez is by how much he spills on the carpet.)

 

In the end, Brendon can’t find Gabe, and can’t find ‘offering wine’, whatever that is, so they end up putting a rain check on calling up Spencer’s dad. Nate and Victoria get picked up by their mother and father respectively before dinner. (It’s explained in the interim that Nate and Victoria are ‘honorary fraternity members’ who know Brendon and Gabe through a poetry group or something, and  They have traditional goa vindaloo curried pork preceded by bhelpuri and sevpuri, and followed by bansudi served cold in cocktail glasses with margarita-like sugar-lipped glasses and slivers of almond. It’s kind of the best cooked meal Ryan has ever had, like, ever. The second it’s in his mouth he feels like he’s home, for just that brief second. His lips bring him home.

Only seven people who weren’t already in the building show up for dinner, which is a huge, visible weight off of Alex Suarez’ shoulders. He introduces himself over the main course, a relaxed smile falling on his face.

Eyeliner, to Ryan’s bemusement, also shows up; he doesn’t look like he’s slept any since they last spoke, but he’s definitely re-applied his makeup and re-straightened his hair. He introduces himself as Peter Pan (“Or just Pete if you don’t feel fancy”) and Ryan is 110% sure his last name is actually Wentz, because that’s what Gabe calls him. Everyone seems to know him, and furthermore, everyone treats him like a best friend. He moves like he’s cast under the shadow of his own personal stormcloud, though, especially tonight. He seems more at lease, though, outside of someone else’s bedroom.

Ryland is a friend of Gabe’s, he lives in the house and must have been hiding out, he introduces himself as Guy Ripley and everyone chuffs and chuckles and corrects him like it’s a running joke, and he shakes Ryan and Spencer’s hands and sits next to them, he starts bonding with Spencer over being half-siblings. Spencer’s family just got a lot bigger and Ryan feels a lot more alone the more people he meets and the more he realizes he’s entirely alone in a sea of something so much more important than he is.

Gabe is ridiculously tall and too pretty for his own good (he looks familiar), and not in Ryan’s way of ‘almost-delicate’ pretty. He’s an adonis, a Uruguayan citizen with an ounce of Greek wine in place of half his ancestral DNA. He goes through about four different types of drinks in the span of dinner, and Alex mixes all of them, Ryan doesn’t see him without alcohol at his lips all night. There’s some drop of seawater in his eyes. Ryan feels they’ll be fast friends.

An equally pretty, but much more pretty in Ryan’s style, (and incredibly thin) young man who has to be a minor sits on Gabe’s right. He keeps a hand on Gabe’s knee the entire night and abstains from the smoking circle after desert, although he shares a cigarette with Ryan after. Ryan never catches his name, but Gabe keeps his eyes on them while they huddle together in the growing chill passing the Virginia Slim back and forth between the two of them and says offhand later that they need to get together like that more often, if only for the ‘leg parade’. 

Sean sits on Gabe’s other side, and is one of those almost-traditionally-attractive types. He still has clip on earphones. He lets Gabe do the talking. Ryan can’t remember his face after tonight.

The other two are a guy who looks like he belongs in a hip hop video (who hangs right at Pete’s side, snickering with him the entire night), and a guy who looks a lot like Pete, introduces himself as Darr, and has a long flop of hair and a half sleeve tattoo. Ryan won’t remember them either.

They spend an hour after dinner just talking, about where they’ve been, and about what gods are like, in real life, in beautiful technicolor almost-flesh-and-blood. Where Ryan doesn’t fit in, he fills the space like water, he half-lies his way through conversation and feels half satisfied with himself when it’s over. It’s nearly midnight by the time Ryan and Spencer head off into the cold, wrapping outer layers tighter around themselves and carefully picking their way toward the driveway when Alex yells out the door. 

“Hey, you two need a ride back to motel 6?”

Of course, they can’t refuse that. 

(When Ryan falls asleep that night he does so in a fashion very much involving the sparrows from the window ledge outside the motel 6 speaking to him in concerned and quiet voices.)

  
  


They move into Brendon’s mom’s mansion the next afternoon. Neither Ryan nor Spencer has more than a backpack or so of belongings and the duffel between them. Moving isn’t hard. 

(Ryan has moved something like fifteen times in his life, it’s come naturally. He never feels stable anymore. He was born to shift from place to place, or so he’s said to Spencer. He lives with displaced motives and a constantly rearranging psyche. )

By the time they call Spencer’s dad, Ryan’s had the time and realization to figure out he has to figure out how to bluff about why Zeus doesn’t recognize him. (He’s posing as Zeus’ kid, right? He’s not sure if Brendon took his wording like that but he knows that’s what he’d meant. And now it’s going to screw him over. Sometimes Ryan hates how he can’t think on his feet).

They do a prayer to Zeus over an ornate cast iron goblet filled with some sort of dark red-violet wine and sprinkle rain water from the last thunderhead (he’s told, it could be from the kitchen sink for all Ryan knows) into it and it all feels very kooky and before Ryan really has a chance to worry about what he’s going to say,  there’s a cuckoo flying down from the highest branch of the nearby willow and landing on the ground before straightening up as a man in his late twenties, full-bearded, prematurely graying and with no growing noticeable wrinkles save laughter lines and a deep scowl line between his brows. It feels outstandingly ordinary.

Ryland is the first to greet Zeus. With a sturdy handshake, Ryland is met with a friendly smile and a yes, yes, let Hera handle it. The exchange is quicker than expected.

Spencer steps forward and kind of half waves and Ryan can feel the embarrassment coming off of him in waves, they crash where the fingertips of his not-waving hand bounce against his thigh. 

Zeus turns, gazes at Spencer, and then at Ryan. Ryan freezes, uncertain if he should do anything out of reverence or meet the god’s gaze or- he lowers his head, looks at his shoes. Zeus proceeds to walk past him to Spencer. He prays- not to anything or anyone, just, pleading- that he hasn’t made an impression.

“You’re new to me, and you want something. All the new ones do.” Zeus says with the corner of his mouth curling upward. He shakes Spencer’s right hand, and then his left.  Spencer looks pale but doesn’t stop meeting his eyes. 

“Hi,” he looks like he swallowing nerve endings, “I’m Spencer. I just moved in. I, I know it’s not the most polite thing to do but, uh. You’re my dad. And my mom, well, she doesn’t have all the money in the world or anything, and I’d really like to go to this college, the--”

“Garden of the Gods. It’s long been where my children go for easy study should they wish to pursue a field in the human’s silly civil structure,.” Zeus gestures to Ryland (who looks up, abashed,their direction), “I’ve got a number of children there now, Ryland is a culinary student. Tuition won’t be an object., What will you be studying?”

Spencer turns white and turns his eyes on Ryan for a moment, searching for help. 

“Uh. Meteorology,” he blurts, stumbling over himself a little. Ryan gives him a ‘seriously?’ look but says nothing. They’re good at this. (Ryan and Spencer have been lying and ad libbing with and around one another since the beginning of time, it feels like.) As soon as Spencer says it he looks a little confused as to why he did.

Zeus has a thunder roll of a laugh, starting low in his chest and bursting forth like rain and the smell after. It shakes his shoulders so hard Ryan thinks he’ll split in two himself and become nothing more than a dozen rain clouds.

“You may attend on one condition,” he says once he’s done laughing. Ryan stops listening then; he knows Spencer will make it work. Spencer’s good at this kind of thing. He doesn’t want to hear his best friend bargaining with gods, so he slinks back into the little cluster of people sitting on the steps of the patio and flops down by Brendon. 

Brendon’s watching Spencer, only notices Ryan when Ryan’s right knee knocks against his left, relaxed. He gives Ryan a distracted smile. 

“Do you want to call to your mom after this?” he asks, brown eyes warm on Ryan. Ryan has to stop himself from icily divulging that he’s never spoken to his mother and knows nothing about her, but he manages to do so, and simultaneously realize it will mean he doesn’t have to bluff about anything with a literal god.

“Nah, no. I don’t need anything from her. I,” Ryan trails off, watching Spencer laugh (after only moments he’s picking up his father’s rolling thunder throaty burble) with the bearded man standing on their lawn who was not two minutes ago a cuckoo perched in an overhead branch, “I don’t need whatever that is. I just want to keep going. College isn’t exactly in my plans.” He swallows whatever emotions try to push themselves past his diaphragm toward his brain while he watches Brendon watch him with a half-cocked head. They sit watching each other for a few long seconds.

“Hey, let’s go upstairs,” Brendon says after the silence has started to pluck at Ryan’s lungs. Ryan doesn’t know how to say he’d rather stay in case Spencer needs him and he doesn’t really want to admit that Spencer probably won’t (that feels a little like a punch in an empty oil drum he calls a ribcage, he can feel the sting reverberate through him like an empty echo).  

He pushes himself off the steps and offers Brendon a hand. He feels the warmth of Brendon’s palm and pushes the feeling, manipulating it in his head and letting his hand linger on Brendon’s far longer than it needs to, Brendon doesn’t seem to mind. He just shoots Ryan a wide, almost-lopsided grin. His cheeks dust red as Ryan lowers his hand back to his pocket, and as Ryan blinks slowly at him, examining his expression, his lip twitches and the picture’s complete.The Infallible Law.

(The bees chatter away at the window boxes as they make their way inside. Ryan’s heart finds their rhythm. It winds the muscles in his shoulders already so tight to near-snapping. He’s just waiting to hear himself break.)

Brendon’s room is at the end of the hall, one of a pair of master bedrooms facing each other at opposite sides of the long hall upstairs which connects all of the bedrooms and upstairs bathrooms to one main thoroughfare. Brendon’s door has a peafowl almost identical to the one on the front door carved out of it in reverse of the engraving seen there. This one is a female; no fan of tail feathers or eye spots. 

Brendon opens the door and Ryan’s kind of loathe to believe it’s actually a bedroom because what he can see of the room is a wall (ending maybe two feet from the perpendicular one so as to form an uncovered doorway at one side of the room), fake fireplace, a couch, a low-slung rectangular coffee table, and a pair of incredibly deep looking arm chairs.  

“You live in a sitting room,” Ryan dryly remarks.

“My bed and stuff’s back there, I guess they couldn’t figure out what to do with all the space in this place,” Brendon says with a slightly sheepish laugh. He practically waltzes back through the empty doorway and Ryan follows, lingering there where the wall ends. 

Brendon’s bed is large, but not oddly shaped or ornately decorated, the same goes for the rest of the furniture in the ‘bed’ chapter of his bedroom. Fancy but not seemingly over-indulgent. It seems a contrast to Brendon’s personality, honestly.

His sheets are green pinstripe and his bed hasn’t been made. Shoes and dirty clothes litter the surfaces and floor in this part of the room, Brendon flashes him an abashed smile.

“It’s messy, just give me a sec.” 

He futilely picks up a pair of shoes and throws them at the closet door, then grabs two packs of Camels from next to where they’d been. He nods, gesturing for them to go back into the sitting room. Ryan retreats, watching Brendon’s moves as he slides down on a couch and crosses his ankle over his knee, setting the packs on his thigh and rooting around in his pockets. Ryan sits next to him (unnecessary, but friendly, Ryan tells himself.) and offers a lighter from his coat pocket, a patterned bic in black and grey he picked up on the ground outside a gas station back in Nevada. 

“Are you okay? You seem a little shaky.” Ryan asks as Brendon takes the lighter, opening the first pack and pulling out a cigarette then handing it to Ryan. Ryan considers not taking one but he shrugs, doing it anyway and setting the pack on the coffee table. 

“Yeah, I think so, I just, I dunno, sometimes I feel a little weird when stuff like this happens. Everyone’s got such a nice relationship with their godparent, I, eh, I dunno. Forget it.” Brendon says, not meeting Ryan’s eyes as he opens the second pack and pulls a plastic ziploc out of it, “Shit. Can you go grab the pipe on my dresser?” 

Ryan doesn’t push.

“Yeah, think I’ll have to move anything radioactive?” Ryan says with a smirk as he uncrosses his ankles and shoves himself up and out of the couch as it tries to consume him. 

“Shut up, I bet it’s cleaner than your room was,” Brendon mutters, reaching out and pinching the outside of Ryan’s thigh as he passes. 

Ryan steps through the doorway and perilously picks his way over to Brendon’s dresser and grabs the green and yellow flowered glass spoon, returning and handing it to Brendon to pack. 

“So, Brendon Urie. Why are we in your room alone together about to get high?” Ryan asks, level, honestly questioning. His eyes are fixed on Brendon’s as they flick over his work with the bowl. He’s got the fingers of someone used to playing piano or doing cross stitching. Intricate, well-controlled movement comes natural to them.

Brendon shrugs, finally looking at Ryan with a genuine, half-tired smile. 

(This is a look Ryan will learn in finessed detail from remembering, this is a memory that will hang suspended like dust in his mind for years to come. Long after the ash has settled on Garden of the Gods, Ryan will have the lining of his memory of Brendon stitched with this smile.)

“I’m not sure. Because I like you, because I want to hear you one on one when your brain lets go,” he says

“My brain doesn’t let go,” Ryan mutters, keeping his eyes forward, “It just changes hands.”

“Green hit?” Brendon says, offering Ryan the pipe and lighter, “With words like that when you’re sober, you should come to Bad Poet Productions.”

“Thanks,” Ryan takes the pipe and sparks the lighter. He holds the smoke and hands the pipe back while he talks, “What’s Bad Poet Productions?”

(They go back and forth like that; ‘here’, ‘thanks’, holding their breath while they speak and exhaling clouds into the room while they listen. In a strange way, it’s comforting, a placeholder between lost words.)

“It’s this thing Pete set up,” Brendon pauses to busies himself with the pipe, “Spoken word poetry at This Ain’t a Scene Art Co-Op. It’s mostly for kids from the college but I bet you he wouldn’t mind you coming. You’ve got poetry dancing at your lips, Ross, you can’t tell me you’re not a writer.”

Ryan shrugs, takes the pipe, passes it back without words.

“You should see if you can get in,” Brendon says finally.

“To Bad Poet?” 

“No, no. Well, yeah, but Garden of the Gods Institute.”

“If you hadn’t picked up on it, neither Spencer nor I know anything about college. Or demigods.” Ryan gives him a ragged smile, smoke curls around his lips.

“Garden of the Gods is hardly a college anyway, a real one. It’s a degree for godkids, easy as pie so you can go do whatever. I’m pretty sure Zeus put it together to push us into fields we could be helpful in and get us there quick. It’s kind of a wet dream. The classes are easy, application and getting in is easy. As long as you’re a demigod it’s pretty much a free ride.” 

“So you think we could stay here? For real?” Ryan asks.

“If I didn’t would I have let you into my house?” Brendon laughs.

“I guess not.”

“You and Spencer fit here, Ryan, don’t worry. I know this all feels crazy and sudden and like your life’s being decided for you but I honestly think you’ll be happy here. I’ll be happy to have you here. For however long you decide to stay,” there’s something in Brendon’s voice that makes Ryan’s stomach hit gravel. Brendon’s hand finds Ryan’s knee.

He feels the unfamiliarity, the feeling that makes his insides churn at being touched, it coils in his gut. It strikes and crashes against his ribs and hips and he swallows hard. He quells it. He always does. He’s been good at that part of this process since he was fifteen and fooling around in the bathroom of a 711 with a girl he met on summer break. 

(This is what he wants, isn’t it? This is what dressing like he does is for, this is what being who he is is for. He’s stitched in DNA and internalized habit to be an object of affections. Infallible Law.)

He slides into the heat behind his eyes and in his temple, focuses on the jolt of charge in his stomach. He lets the melting at the edges feeling take his muscles. He lets his instincts take over, turns off emotion and guilt, Ryan makes himself shameless.

“Okay,” he says, smiling a blearily lopsided smile at Brendon, and he’s conceding to so much more than trying to figure out this college thing and funding and whatever. He doesn’t really think about it, though. Brendon sets the pipe on the table beside the two cigarette packs.

Ryan shifts into the touch when the hand returning traces up his arm. 

“Why did you leave Vegas in your words?” Brendon says, eyes not focusing on Ryan while his hands work their way along comparatively innocent skin and Ryan doesn’t answer. He locks his head down and starts operating by body. Brendon’s doing nothing wrong and Ryan doesn’t stop him. Then he gives him the wrong-right signal, sliding a hand down Brendon’s side and leaning in a little. 

He’s gearing up for the proceedings he’s used to; hot and satisfying, guilty and uncouth in hindsight, he’s gearing up to put away everything in his brain he knows will ache about this later and let his hips move. 

(Ryan is used to this; he’s done this so many times before. He knows every skilled movement to find exactly the right sounds and sights, he knows what he wants and he makes it happen, he’s good at what he does, even if he doesn’t enjoy it in retrospect, he’ll hate himself for it tomorrow. This is a fact he’s already accepted. This is calculated risk for a feeling of fulfilment. It always has been.)

Brendon slides off the couch, falling square on his knees, and when Ryan runs a hand through his hair he leans into it.  Ryan gives an experimental tug (he knows how this goes; he's gauging Brendon's reaction) and Brendon looks like he loses whatever wind he had in his lungs. He looks up at Ryan with a look somewhere between pathetic, desperate, and apologetic. When Ryan gives Brendon's head a somewhat sharp shove down, Brendon practically starts whimpering. (Ryan has gauged Brendon's reaction).

The soft rapping at the door lets them both notice to look decent; they’re not far gone, Brendon’s hardly visually aroused, and Ryan’s kept himself in check. Ryan stays relaxed where he is on the couch while Brendon springs to open the door, half hiding behind it.

Gabe quirks an eyebrow at him, and walks straight into the room, flopping down next to Ryan and taking the pipe from the table, one arm rests behind him and Gabe nudges his shoulder with the outside of his thumb.

“Spence is looking for you.” 

And Ryan’s out of the room like a shot. Because if Spencer needs him there’s no other place to be but with Spencer. (He can hear Brendon telling Gabe off as he disappears down the hall.)

 

The day Ryan goes to Bad Poet Productions for the first time is also the day he does his make up for the first time in what he’s pretty sure has been three and a half weeks. Brendon’s given him run of his wardrobe. Ryan’s kind of psyched. 

(He leaves the room with a carefully chosen button up and a vest later dubbed simply ‘the rose vest’ which Brendon is never actually sure on an origin for and which has presumably been in the house since whenever; it doesn’t fit Brendon, even when they try that months later.)

This Ain’t a Scene Art Co-Op is a property with a cluster of buildings and two courtyards that looks like it was probably built in the mid nineties. It isn’t far from Brendon’s  house. 

Spencer doesn’t come with Brendon and Ryan, but Victoria and Gabe’s (presumed) boyfriend, William, does. It’s only as they’re pulling up when Ryan starts remembering why Gabe and Will look so familiar. He thinks he’s read about one or both of them somewhere. Where, he’s still struggling to figure out as Brendon walks through the lawn to get to the building with the open, red door.

A piece of cardboard is taped to the door with packing tape, and someone’s taken a tagging sharpie and scrawled ‘these open doors are open-ended’ across the cardboard, and under it, ‘bad poet productions, 6pm to 8pm, after(life) party til pete has to get his ass to work’. Brendon’s hand loosely finds Ryan’s. Ryan feels sick, and wishes he could lie about the feeling in his gut if someone happens to ask. He wishes he cared more about Brendon. Everyone seems to think he should.

A long haired man with intricate full sleeves and a tank top sits on a stool at the door. He grins at Brendon in a shy, kind way. It’s a little surprising to Ryan, guys with the lean kind of muscle he has tend to be tough. 

“Hey Hurley,” Brendon says. 

“Who’s the date?” 

“Ryan Ross, Pete invited him, I hear. Will and Victoria are right behind us, just had to get their stuff out of the trunk. Are we doing a dry night?”

Hurley scowls a little at the question, like he disapproves, “No, no holds barred, I guess, Pete hasn’t had a day off in a week and a half, I guess he needs to relax.” His eyes settle past them then, where Will and Victoria are picking their way up the lawn. Ryan nods at the manifest doorman and holds out a hand to shake. He’s got a firmer grip than expected from someone his size, and with that pitch to his voice.

“I’m Ryan Ross. Can I go inside?”

“Andy Hurley, of course you can. I’m not guarding the door or anything. Just keeping an eye out for someone.”

Ryan nods at him, thanks him and slips inside while Brendon and the others stop to chat with Andy more.

The interior of the place is surprisingly cozy, a tiny stage rigged at one end, and chairs set up through the rest of what probably used to be a moderately sized apartment, there’s a door marked ‘restroom’ and beyond that a short hallway to a second room where there are a few low sagging couches and faded futons on the floor in front of a fridge and a defacto bar fashioned out of a rolling cart, an odd out of place island counter, and a sink set in the middle of it. .

There aren’t many seats filled (it’s only 5:45), Pete’s sitting on the stage, deep in conversation with a man who has his back to Ryan (he’s wearing a striped sweater), lighting up and gesturing wildly. He looks more tired than last time Ryan saw him, but still alertly enthralled in the conversation. 

A dark haired guy of maybe twenty-something who has a soft face and gives Pete a run for his eyeliner game is examining a piece of art on the wall, blowing steam off a mug of coffee topped in a white roth Ryan places as alcoholic in nature by instinct’ which, for some reason, seems to be producing steam in the precise shape of human skulls. He’s casting Pete what can only be read as death-glares every so often. 

(Across the room there’s a man with a huge afro who is, in turn, tossing Eyeliner 2 {like Ross is one to talk right now} careful glances every few moments. He looks like a chaperone checking on a notoriously troublesome child.)

A young man with a dyed black fringe obscuring his face is sitting on a seat pulled halfway between the stage and the first row of chairs, plucking at another bass, fingers anxiously tightening and loosening strings. Ryan’s pretty sure he’s got a lip ring and a horrible smirk. 

Next to him, a pair of men are flitting on and off the stage, fiddling with sound equipment. (Really, only the shorter, asian one is doing any work, the blond just listening to the bassist and wiggling his upper body to the beat while he sits on a speaker and swings his legs. They’re exchanging words and laughter between the two of them that Ryan can’t hear. He feels waves off them of some sort of emotion he can’t properly place.)

Besides that, the room is impossibly still, and empty for how many people are already here.

And it doesn’t matter because Ryan’s making a beeline for the two guitars leaned against the stage. (Why a spoken word poetry performance would need so many musical instruments is beyond Ryan and he’s thrilled about it.) 

He picks up the acoustic one and sits himself down in the seat in the front row closest to the dye-heavy bassist who looks up and smiles encouragingly. 

“Hey,” he says, and Ryan’s fingers stutter before he finds the notes and starts strumming along something that sounds almost half decent layered over the bass. He winces with lack of practice.

“Hi,” he says, looking up and meeting the bassist’s eyes. “I’m Ryan.” 

He lets the honey coat his voice. The way he does when meeting people. He doesn’t think about it anymore.

“Max,” he gets in response. 

After a moment, a snare on repeat picks up and Ryan looks around for a source before he finds the tech guy shooting them a thumbs up from the tiny sound table. (Another thing that he didn’t expect to see at a spoken word thing.)

Pete’s suddenly watching them, and then he’s picking up the bass between him and the striped sweater guy and scooting over to create a little triangle. Ryan doesn’t miss a beat as he turns to include him in the circle. He slowly blends in, echoing and perfectly mirroring Max’ cords. 

They finish the riff they were exploring pretty quickly although with a lot of mistake on Ryan’s part, and pause, look at each other for a moment, and then Ryan, out of sheer instinct, jumps into the starting cords for a Beatles song because it’s what he sings to Spencer when he doesn’t know what else to sing for Spencer when Spencer asks him to sing to him. It’s automatic. 

A weight drops into the seat next to him with a third bass and William’s suddenly on his other side, playing along on the other guitar, and swaying it against his hip in a way Ryan takes notes on for if he ever tries to seduce someone via guitar playing. Victoria’s made her way over to the keyboard in the corner and is tapping out a faltering rendition of the guitar notes. It’s an odd assembly. Max looks up, obviously doesn’t know the notes but he’s watching Pete’s hands close enough to figure it out. 

By the time Ryan breaks in with the first line, they have some mismatched semblance of a song.

A drizzle is starting to come down outside. The room fills with the smell of longing and old dust meeting new rain. By the time they’re at the second line, Pete, Will, and man in the striped sweater, who sat down next to him with his bass, are all toppling in like cliff diving. The man in the sweater’s voice makes Ryan feel something he doesn’t know if he’s ever felt. It’s like falling asleep. That second of comfort before nothing.

The lines Ryan always forgets come, but they’ve got it together now, their voices crack a little where they’re supposed to, everything seems okay for one single bleeding moment in history. He doesn’t want to leave, for that split second. 

Brendon joins in then, his eyes are fixed on Ryan with that look that says he’s falling in love. Ryan tries to forget it.

He’s out of breath by the end of the song, lifts his gaze to the bassist next to him, the sweater guy, and his eyes meet warm ones that feel like coffee on cold fingers. Some part of Ryan Ross’ fucked up psyche gives in and admits that he’s already falling in love too, with where the mountains crash like waves on the atmosphere, and with the people who lay like bones hidden in the hills. Waiting to comfort the people Ryan cares most about. He’s falling in love with the sky where it’s thin, skin between the highland desert and the stars, with standing red stones, and with red-cheeked people who are falling in love with each other. 

(Or he’s soon to be.)

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a(/n almost) completely unedited 10.6k words which make up only half (maybe less!) of a universe which will have so much more; this is Ryan's origin story, issue 001 if you will. It's been written in no less than fifteen hours, and due to that, I suggest you read with a grain of salt. Friendships, and often relationships, are hazy here; these are the Lost Boys of the rocky mountains, none of them know what they're doing. Whatever you're expecting, you're likely to find it. (unless it's good writing, I'm so bad at that)
> 
> Please stay tuned for Part II, and for other installments in this series! I can't wait to explore this universe fully. If you have questions, comments, or anything, please don't hesitate to speak up! Even if it's criticism! I live off people talking about my writing, seriously. 
> 
> Thanks for reading the first half of Any Failing Empire - Maybe I Will, Maybe I Won't.  
> (I'm pouring out my heart for paper)
> 
> -Reggie (big thanks to frankie who helped with details and my good friend ry who divulged in pre-planning with me)  
> \--  
> edit (morning of 12/10/2014): just wanted to mention for posterity's sake that the general... 'black out'-age of the actual act of doing drugs, drinking alcohol, and, sometimes, having sex are things not that i'm afraid to write about, but things that the focal character of this issue, ryan, has distanced himself from thinking about; he's intentionally desensitized himself to it and de-prioritized it in his head because they're too big of a problem for him to deal with in the present and he doesn't feel like he has the 'luxury' of thinking long term. (at least, in his current state) there are exceptions (social drinking, pot, etc) that he feels more comfortable with, but for the most part, choosing not to detail the precise actions going into it is a stylistic choice to magnify the effect of the 'distanced' feeling. thx.


	2. Part II - When Suddenly It's Gray

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ryan Ross punches Gerard Way out in one hit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Taken through the Overhaul Edit on 7/4/16

* * *

* * *

 

#### but leave the waves at the ocean

* * *

* * *

Jon Walker is the name of the man in the striped sweater; Jon Walker is the name of the man who looks at Ryan from over a bass guitar and makes the tension which has been pulling Ryan apart for years release. Jon Walker is the name of the man who knows the bass line to every single song Ryan starts playing. Jon Walker is the name of the man who can look at Ryan Ross and make him feel like he’s come home. (Jon Walker is also the name of the man who drove Ryan and Spencer from Grand Junction to Colorado Springs, but Ryan doesn’t recognize him, and Jon doesn’t recognize Ryan yet either. That will come later.)

Ryan hates it, from the second he skates eyes down Jon’s jaw, tracing the shadow of stubble just becoming a beard, to his perfect throat (it’s in Ryan’s nature to let his thoughts linger on how his lips would fit into the dip under his jaw; he doesn’t allow himself to), to the fact he’s sitting there with his ankle crossed over his knee and a bass under his arm at a fucking poetry meeting. 

Ryan hates how Brendon’s eyes don’t leave him the entire time. Usually he’d lap up the affection, but this means complications.

He’s swimming in resentment, but he buries it; Ryan is good at that. He just keeps singing, lets the rolodex of song titles in his brain pick one up after the next, clumsy fingers slowly gaining practice. He can feel his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

The twenty minutes (they start late) between when Ryan arrives and when Bad Poet actually starts stretch on for an impressive amount of time while Ryan is pointedly engaging in the activity of Not Watching Jon Walker Play Bass. 

Ryan goes to find Brendon when the mic picks up and Mike, the techie, tests it a couple times, then tells his blonde friend ‘we’re starting, get the fuck off the equipment already, little shit’. They take seats near the back. 

Brendon is nowhere to be found, and Ryan settles for sitting next to Victoria where she’s saved a seat for the three others in their party among the suddenly crowded hall. She smiles at him when he carefully sits himself down. He gives her a real, genuine smile back. They’ve both got intricate eye makeup on, and Ryan feels a bit of a kinship with her (maybe for more than the makeup), even though she’s sixteen and a world away from where he is.

(Two years can change a lot.)

“Are you a demigod?” she asks, out of nowhere. They both keep their eyes on the stage, Ryan stiffens. 

“I know you said you are. Sorry to ask. I’m just curious. You never talk about your parent, and you haven’t done any, you know, divine things in front of us. Being one of them is usually something people are pretty proud of,” she continues, her voice is gentle, low enough not to be overheard. 

Ryan finally breaks down and looks at her.

“I don’t know. I’m probably not. Never met my mom but my dad seems pretty solid on saying she’s a sinner and dead to us. He’s said she’s flat out dead before, too. I don’t think a god would ever sleep with him,” he says it all low, leaning a little into her although keeping his face forward.

Victoria nods, slow. 

“We should talk later. If you want,” she says, hurriedly and soft while her eyes are flicking up to see Brendon who’s returned from the back room and shoves a plastic cup into Ryan’s hand, then looks at Victoria, gesturing at the two remaining red solo cups in his hands. 

“Want one?”

“What’s in it?”

Brendon exaggerates a shrug. “Something green. Will made it so it’s kind of russian roulette as to whether it’s alcoholic or not. Doesn’t smell that way, but knowing the guys he hangs out with, I’d never go on smell alone.”

Ryan takes a swig of whatever’s in the cup and raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t know what Brendon’s trying to say here.

“Tastes like kiwi and flavored vodka. Probably whipped cream? Kinda gross,” he says, “There’s definitely alcohol.”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll take one,” she says, taking one of the cups from Brendon just as Pete takes the stage. 

He taps the mic with one hand, holds it steady and clamps the edge of his own solo cup with a free finger with the other. He looks fucking exhausted.

(And paler than Ryan remembers him. His hair isn’t so meticulously straightened, only a little bit of humor’s left his eyes, his pupils are wide, Ryan knows the symptoms of ‘just a little strung out’ better than anyone. He’s seen them on Spencer. He’s seen them in the mirror.)

“Welcome to Bad Poet Productions at This Ain’t a Scene, It’s a Fucking Art Co-Op. I’m your host and founder, Pete Wentz, you all know that already though. Even if I see some fresh faces out there. I don’t wanna drag this on, though” Pete pauses to let the soft tumble of laughter to work its way through the room before he begins again, “Before we start, I gotta shout out to my wing-man and the guy whose building this is, Andy fucking Hurley, seriously guys, he’s a ray of sunshine,” Pete stops long enough to wave Andy up and Andy smiles and rolls his eyes and stands up and sits down like they’ve done this a thousand times. They probably have.

“Also, gotta pay the good lip service to Brendon Urie, without whom this sad little project wouldn’t have gotten off the ground,” Brendon stands and sits, saluting Pete with his cup, “Motherfucking Dirty,” Pete waves a long-haired bare-chested man up,  the guy bellows and actually lifts his chair above his head and then, surprisingly, sets it back down to sit on, 

“And last but not least, everyone’s favorite dealer and constant funder of creativity, Jonathan Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.” 

Jon raises his hands in a defeatist, ‘what do you know’ gesture, half stands up, then sits down and calls up to the stage,

“I’m trying not to get arrested, you know.”

A kid in the back replies, “I’m the only cop here and I’m a customer, Jon, you’re good.”

“You’re not a cop, Jimmy, shut the fuck up,” the girl next to him mutters and Ryan’s too busy wondering if Jon’s full name is really Jonathan Jacob to recognize either of them as vaguely familiar. Or to linger too long on the fact that the stranger who can literally make him feel at ease with a glance apparently sells drugs for a living.

Pete hushes them, and tries to stop chuckling, he can’t really help himself, though.

“Alright, kids, without further ado, Bad Poet Productions, Brendon’s up first.”

Brendon’s poem is short, he’s passionate but he doesn’t have a handle on something, and Ryan will later realize the he manifests metaphor is a little… bland in Ryan’s eyes, but he has the voice to put heart in the holes where his words don’t have it. He’s nearly crying by the end. Ryan will never again remember what the subject matter of the poem was, besides a peacock and a sparrow and Brendon maintaining a lingering tendency to catch Ryan’s eyes while he speaks. 

Andy takes the stage, and after that, the coffee guy (Gerard, Ryan learns), and the coffee guy’s chaperone takes the stage after a ‘Sidney’ (Ryan doesn’t catch his name.)

Pete takes the stage somewhere in the middle and the second he starts talking, Ryan feels a deep lurching in his chest. It’s not a bad feeling. It’s been awhile since the tide crashed against his ribcage.

“They did a study,” he’s spitting out (his first line iss something like  ‘there’s always so much mystery in other people’, it seems out of place), like his life depends on the words crawling out of his mouth, “and found that countless men would choose gambling over love if given the chance. Even more would choose pornography over love if given the chance.”

Ryan feels like there’s seafoam rising in his throat. It stings a little. He can feel love spilling off Pete. Almost enough to mask the intense emptiness he’s just ripped open and visible in himself. He couldn’t feel any of it, couldn’t see it plain on his face, before. Now his eyes are far away even as they skate the crowd.

“We are cavemen; it seems like that will never change. I wonder if the men they studied have ever really been in love? For whatever reason, it seems like we’re against love,” his eyes find Ryan’s and his voice goes rougher, Ryan feels like choking, “Everyone equates it to gullibility, or dirties it up, makes it cheap with lingerie shows and boxed candy.” 

It’s shaping up to be less a poem, more some sort of vindicated speech. Ryan checks and Brendon and Victoria both seem to be used to this. This is normal, then.

“I’m writing her an email from a Super 8 because I can’t go home, it depresses me to think about. Sometimes love is just cheap, when given the chance many people choose cocaine over love.” Ryan almost-cringes, he catches Gerard’s head snapping up to meet Pete’s eyes.

“I wouldn’t say that’s a bad choice, the endorphins released during infatuation are similar to heroin. Oxycontin, found in newlyweds, is most like ecstasy, MDMA, every touch tingles, I think I read that somewhere. Love exists in powder. Love exists in pills. We’re all fucking addicts.” He takes a pause because he’s put too much energy in and he’s talking too fast and he stopped looking at the crowd. Pete lifts his gaze. 

“I’m writing her because I’m feeling guilty. Guilty for the fun I’ve been having, guilty for the close calls I’ve had in darkened corners, guilty for forgetting about her and letting my life run free. Guilty for feeling good. Guilty for taking pills. Sometimes we take chances.” He stops, full stop, out of breath. Ryan’s lungs feel like empty clem shells sucking in salt, but in an emotional way. 

“Thanks,” his tone loses the poetry, “As usual, work in progress, yadda yadda.” He thanks the crowd, ducks his head, and announces the next performer. Victoria goes up, produces a stunning, and thankfully somewhat less raw piece, and she’s followed by a nerdy looking teenager who looks like he’s only gotten marginally more sleep than Pete in the past five days and who has three sheets of paper for his poem, “Blasphemy”. 

 

When Pete goes to sit down at the end of the night, Ryan immediately gets up and sits beside him in the back corner he’s chosen to watch Jon and Andy clearing the other chairs from. 

“Where did you learn to write like that?”

Pete shrugs. “I went to Columbia for a hot minute. I don’t remember taking any good writing classes since high school, though. Maybe before.”

“Did you transfer here?” Ryan’s asking before he knows what to say.

“No, no. I just dropped out.” Pete grins, patting Andy’s shoulder as he sits down on his other side. 

“Do you go to Garden of the Gods then?” Ryan half-turns his head to the side in a gesture he realizes a second too late is one he learned from Spencer. Sometimes he hates how much that kid can get to him. 

(This is the part where it hits him like an ice cube hitting an empty glass that he hasn’t really spoken to Spencer in the past few days, which is something which he shouldn’t be concerned about, he tells himself that anyway, but which also is incredibly unusual for them.)

“Nah. Dirty and Andy do, though.” 

“Dirty doesn’t go there,” Andy pipes up, “He’s just making his way around campus staying with different fraternities until they kick him out for whatever horrible thing he does that week.” He and Pete laugh. 

“Yeah, and Andy’s doing some nerd degree that probably won’t ever lead to anything but him coming and working at Walmart with me.”

Andy’s ‘excuse you’ comes at about the same time as Ryan’s ‘seriously? you work at walmart?’ 

Pete grins a toothy grin. He’s got impressive canines.

“Employee of the month like six months running.” 

“No shit? Isn’t that place horrible?”

“The pay is shit and my boss sucks and the benefits are bullshit,” Pete says, “but I’ve got great co-workers and since I’m on night shift, I can get away with barely doing anything most of the time.”

Ryan nods and almost asks how he sleeps (before realizing that’s a stupid question, he obviously doesn’t do that much.) but Pete beats him to it and keeps talking.

“I don’t have to work until midnight. Why don’t you hang out with us til then? You look like the after party type, Ross.”

Ryan gestures back to Will, Brendon, and Victoria. 

“Will has to get back to his dorms and Victoria’s heading home, Brendon has class in the morning, I think,” Ryan says, giving them a helpless little shrug. 

“Yeah but you don’t,” Pete counters.

Ryan looks at him, quirks the corner of his mouth up a tiny bit, and nods. 

“Well, Pete Wentz, looks like you’ve got me for the evening.”

“I get what I want,” Pete smirks back at Ryan, “We can drive you back, right, Andy? You're heading back to the dorms to see your girl, aren’t you?” 

Andy nods. “No skin off my nose to have some company.”

“Then, too the joint roller!” Pete’s out of his chair before Ryan even realizes he’s getting up, and Ryan doesn’t really let himself think enough to have another option besides to follow him into the back room where he’s decided to ambush Will, a plan he tells Ryan in stage whisper as he drags him through the door frame.

“What does ambushing a guy who doesn’t even smoke weed have to do with rolling a joint?” Ryan asks, and Pete just snickers. 

“First, Will totally smokes weed,” he says, rolling his eyes, “He just says he doesn’t. Gabe has so gotten him high.”

“He has not,” Ryan argues, “He totally didn’t have anything to do with it after dinner the other night.”

“Yeah, my guess is he only does it in private with the hot piece of tail he somehow landed.”

“Somehow?” Ryan quirks an eyebrow at Pete, they’re not whispering anymore, “I’m pretty sure Will is like, the third hottest guy in this building.”

It’s Will who answers, as he casually comes through the door and leans against the fridge. 

“Ryan’s right, for the record.” 

Pete rolls his eyes and takes the half step to lean in and whisper something in Will’s ear, which Will punches him in the shoulder for.

“Hey. Roll a joint for us,” Pete says, louder.

“I don’t carry that stuff around to pawn off to the pathetic sack of dreams who wants in my boyfriend’s pants.” Will smirks.

Pete rolls his eyes and reaches into his pocket, but Ryan’s already offering Will his little metal stash box.

“Come off it, Will, I’ve been in Gabe’s pants,” Pete looks at Ryan as he adds, “Five out of ten, wouldn’t recommend.” Will just rolls his eyes and leans his elbows on the bar while he loads the rizla he was offered. Everything is almost-awkward quiet for a moment while Will rolls.

When he turns around and hands Pete the joint, Pete holds it up.

“That,” he says, gesturing to it with his free hand, “Is why you come to this guy who apparently doesn’t smoke pot to roll a joint.”

To be fair, it’s kind of the most evenly rolled joint Ryan’s ever seen. It looks more like a cigarette than anything else. 

“You didn’t even have a grinder,” Ryan says to Will as Will ducks behind the bar to grab a bottle of pinnacle, a bottle of rootbeer and pour himself a drink in another red cup. “And you’re fucking drinking whipped cream vodka. How old even are you?” 

Will just winks at him and breezes past him, pausing to turn around at the door to talk to him while he walks backward out into the room. 

“Should I tell Bren you’re coming back after us? We’re heading out as soon as Bren’s got his stuff from Jon.”

“Yes please!” Ryan calls after him, giving Pete a kind of baffled look.  Pete’s already ducking behind the bar again. 

“You’re a good kid, I think. You’re an asshole,” Pete says, he looks up from rummaging in the cabinet under the bar, he can practically see through Ryan’s eyes and he knows it, “but you’re a good kid. Be gentle with Brendon, he’s a good friend. You want something to drink?”

“Is there anything that isn’t pinnacle?” Ryan says, trying to ignore the fact Pete seems to know way more than he should.

“So many things. We just keep that around for Will. He’s a flavored vodka nut I guess, it’s gross.”

“Seconded,” Ryan says, eyebrows raised. 

“Who’s kid are you?” Ryan asks after Pete continues rummaging.

“A crazy woman’s.” Pete’s head pops up, dark eyes fixed on Ryan. 

“I mean who’s your god parent?”

“Morpheus,” he says, and Ryan can’t see his mouth but the grin touches his eyes. It takes Ryan a minute to figure out who that even is. His education on the gods has never been very extensive. 

“Dreams,” Ryan says, finally, “You weren’t lying when you said you came in because I was having a bad dream, did you?”

“It helped that your roommate left the door wide open.” 

“God fucking damnit Spencer.”

(They end up smoking that joint with none other than Jon fucking Walker. Ryan doesn’t look up the entire time. He only meets Pete’s eyes. He doesn’t want the feeling that just being two feet away from Jon gives him to get any warmer. Ryan tells Walker nothing about himself. It’s intentional. He gives no reason to admire or pity him. He’s very careful to not even let their hands touch when they pass to one another. Something about his voice seems familiar. It’s not until later that he’ll realize why.)

* * *

When Andy drops him off in front of the mansion/frat house/peacock habitat, Pete’s happily stoned and late for work, scrunched in the corner of the back seat, humming along to the radio, with his bass cuddled deep against his shoulder. Ryan’s also stoned. He wants to go straight to bed, maybe bum a cigarette from one of the frat guys, and fall the fuck asleep.

Alex is standing out front, a Newport between his lips. The cherry glows red, casts half-shadows on Alex’ face. He’s still in his apron. 

“Brace yourself,” he says as Ryan approaches. 

“What’s up?” Ryan asks, eyebrows coming together.

“Gabe’s drunk. Drunk drunk. He and Will got in a fight, capital F.” 

“Is he okay?” Ryan asks. There’s bass literally shaking the front porch as he puts his first foot on it. He can hear it blare-whirring through the walls but he can’t make out whatever music is playing inside.

“No, but I wouldn’t go near him. Victoria nearly got re-porpoised for trying to talk him down. He’s just sitting in the living room in his boxers trying to break the speakers with Sean’s music. It’s how he copes. Let him have his space, yeah?”

“Yeah. Can I bum one of those?” Ryan’s asking before he thinks to say please. Alex hands him the pack. 

“Out of curiosity, do you know where Spencer is?” Alex is asking as Ryan’s taking a cigarette out of the pack and handing it back. Something a bit like dread knots itself in the base of Ryan’s stomach.

“I haven’t talked to him since we left.”

“He ditched kitchen duty today.”

“Did he say he’d do it?” Worry settles down on top of the knot of dread. He forgets to light his cigarette. Spencer sticks to his word. It’s almost religious. 

“Yeah.”

“Fuck. Where was he last?” Ryan’s heartbeat kicks up. He feels his stomach turn.

“I think he went down to the campus to register for classes just after you guys left. He got the call just before that they’d have him. Should have been home by now, though, he got a ride.”

Ryan wants to say ‘that was fast’ like this is normal, like Spencer ditching something he’s said he’ll do is something that he would do. 

He wouldn’t. Ryan knows he doesn’t do that.

He hands the cigarette back to Alex and turns on his heel. He’s only halfway down the block when he’s sticking his thumb out, walking backward. 

“Idiot!” Alex calls after him, a shower of sparks indicating  him putting out his cigarette, but Ryan’s already around the block. It only takes another half block for Alex to catch up to him in his beat up, 1992 volvo. 

(Alex’ car becomes one of Ryan’s favorites. The ceiling fabric is literally coming off the ceiling, the floorboards are only just barely holding together, the upholstery is shredded, and for a brief time before Alex eventually junks the thing in 2009 {what will be Ryan’s junior year at GotGI}, the entire right half of the dashboard goes mysteriously missing. No one ever knows what happens to it.)

“Need a lift?” he yells through the window (which only opens halfway and kind of gets stuck awkwardly). Ryan rolls his eyes and gets in. 

“Where will he be on campus?” Ryan asks, “Where would you go to register for classes?”

 

In true fashion, Garden of the Gods Institute is made up of traditional greco-roman buildings shoved up against the hills with a breathtaking view of both Garden of the Gods, and Colorado Springs. Ryan doesn’t have time to let his breath be taken. 

He’s on a mission. The second Alex is rolling to a stop, Ryan’s door half-slams open and his foot hits the concrete. He only stumbles a little as the car keeps moving to its final resting position. 

The second he’s out of the car, he’s calling Spencer’s name, eyes wide as he realizes he has no clue where to start and that doesn’t matter because he keeps walking up the street in front of (what Ryan presumes is) the library. The only person he sees is a kid in glasses sitting with his head tossed back against the library wall while he watches the sky. From the way his shoulders are shaking, he’s probably crying but Ryan can’t tell. It doesn’t matter; Spencer doesn’t wear glasses. He’s not that thin.

As Ryan rounds the corner his calls get louder. The (presumed) sorority house at the far end of the block suddenly has an open door and a willowy girl summons a small snap of lightning that lands on the lightning rod on the building next to Ryan. 

“Shut the fuck up,” he can hear, yelled in the distance. Then the light at the doorway is gone and Ryan keeps going. 

He rounds another corner, comes up on two huge buildings (he’ll later be told these are the dorms.) facing away from each other and looking out over large parking lots in front of each, with a sand pit in the middle. 

The door of the left opens, and a silhouette is caught momentarily in the light, but then it’s gone. Ryan’s throat feels like it’s collapsing. Spencer’s name leaves his lips again. Then there’s a guy heading toward him from the direction of the two buildings, as he comes better into view of the streetlight at the end of the road, Ryan recognizes Gerard’s chaperone. 

“Have you seen Gerard?” is the first thing out of his mouth once he recognizes Ryan.

“No, have you seen Spencer?” Ryan answers, both of them have owlish wide eyes now, both of them obviously scared, and too concerned about other things to worry about looking scared.

“Who?”

“Spencer. Spencer Smith. About this tall. Soft voice. He was wearing a ninja turtles t-shirt.”

“No. Sorry. Fuck,” chaperone shakes his head. 

“Is Gerard okay?” Ryan asks, eyebrows lifted, he’s still skating his gaze for Spencer. Adrenaline floods his veins. 

“He disappeared after he talked to his brother. I guess they’re not on very good terms right now.”

Ryan gave as sympathetic a look as he could manage. 

“I have to keep looking for Spencer. He might have done something stupid.”

“I know the feeling. If you see Gerard, just…” The chaperone reaches for Ryan’s arm and Ryan gives it while he pulls a sharpy out of his back pocket and scrawls ‘Ray Toro’ and his 8-digit phone number.

“Call me.” 

Ryan quickly steals the sharpy and does the same to Ray’s arm. 

“You too,” he says nodding vigorously and then shoving the pen into Ray’s hands and taking off again, this time toward the dorms. 

He skirts the perimeter of the twin buildings, then checks between and treks off toward the streets he didn’t check on campus. 

It’s been an hour and a half in the growing cold by the time Ryan finds Spencer and Gerard slumped together out back of one of the buildings Ryan doesn’t presently care about the function of, Gerard’s head on Spencer’s shoulder and Spencer’s eyes half-closed, pupils blown as he stares into the ditch across the street. The marlboro between Gerard’s fingers is burning down the filter. (Everyone’s an ocean drowning.) Rain is threatening at the sky again.

The first thing Ryan does is crouch down in front of Spencer, who hardly seems to register he’s there until he’s talking.

“Spencer, are you okay? Fuck, fuck you had me so worried, Spencer what did you take?” it’s not a question of if he’s on something. Spencer’s eyes snap wide and he looks at Ryan like he’s fucking terrified of him.

Gerard’s eyes open, his pupils are blown, too, his sclera reddish pink and his face blotchy like he’s been crying. 

“Cat Valium,” he croaks, “probably had pills before I got here too.”

Ryan looks straight into Gerard’s eyes, feeling the beginnings of rage bubble just under his collarbone and diaphragm.

“You fucking gave him ketamine. You fucking gave my best fucking friend fucking ketamine, enough to get him like this?” his voice is raw from calling Spencer’s name and he gestures wildly at Spencer (who flinches, hard) and he practically screams, “After you fucking knew he was on pills?”

Gerard looks a little scared now, too. “Yes?” He gives a little innocent smile.

Ryan has never punched someone unconscious in one hit before. 

(Ryan has now punched someone unconscious in one hit.)

* * *

After Ryan calls Ray (which he does promptly after punching Gerard out), it only takes him three minutes to get there in his car (which is, by some coincidence, a 1997 volvo which is much less trashed than Alex’), and it only takes about ten minutes to get an unconscious Gerard and a near-unconscious Spencer into the back seat. 

“There’s no way we’re getting them up the stairs to our dorm,” Ray says, then he looks at Ryan, concern etched into every corner of his face, “Do they need to go to the hospital?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan shakes his head, “I don’t fucking know. They’re breathing. They’re not vomiting.” Gerard’s coming to, as Ryan looks at them and Ray starts the car. “Looks like Gerard’s waking up, he’ll have a wicked bruise, but he’s not even k-holing. He’s a regular user?”

Ray keeps his eyes on the road as he pulls them off the curb. “I think so. He’s opportunistic. He takes whatever he gets his hands on, I think.”

Ryan nods. Spencer hasn’t ever done ketamine before; he knows that much. He always has and still does have Ryan’s interest above Gerard. Ryan’s much more concerned about him. 

(He might still be a little pissed that Gerard gave his best friend fuckiing ketamine when he was already visibly intoxicated.)

“We can both help Spencer up the stairs fine if Gerard can walk,” Ryan says, still turned around in his seat watching Spencer and Gerard.

“Gerard, can you walk?” Ray asks.

“I can fly, motherfucker,” is what Ryan’s pretty sure Gerard says. 

“Yeah, he can probably manage,” Ray says. 

 

It’s six in the morning when Spencer comes to all the way; it’s touch and go, slipping in and out of consciousness. Ryan’s exhausted, miserable, and just so concerned for his best friend that he starts crying as soon as Spencer groans out “Ryan?” and tugs at his shirt a little. 

They’re laying on a pile of blankets probably summoned by someone’s grandmother in a blood sacrifice on the floor of Ray and Gerard’s dorm room. Ryan has his back to Gerard (who, despite having a bed, decided that having a rest on the floor would be the best decision he had made all night, and who Ryan is still a bit miffed at), and has a hand outstretched to run fingers at Spencer’s hairline. Their knees are touching, and Ryan’s arm is tucked between them while Spencer’s begin to catch in Ryan’s shirt (the rose vest is tossed over the back of Ray and Gerard’s cheap grey couch). 

Ryan kisses Spencer’s forehead, twelve times in a row and wraps his arms around him tight. 

“Spencer, Spencer, Spencer. I’m here. I’m here. It’s okay.”

(he’s done this every time Spencer has stirred)

“Ryan,” Spencer’s lips curl into a little smile, then a frown. “Where are we?”

“Ray and Gerard’s dorm.”

“Whose?” Spencer clings a little. Ryan’s whole chest opens up and he scoots closer. 

“Gerard. He got you high this morning.”

“Kitty guy?” 

“Kitty guy,” Ryan says, taking a minute for his mental rolodex of street names for drugs to catch up to him and give him an explanation for the nickname.

“Is he okay?”

Ryan jerks a finger behind him. “Asleep.”

Spencer nods, leaning his face into Ryan’s shoulder. “Okay.”

They’re silent for a long minute.

“I’m in love with Brendon Urie,” Spencer says then. 

“Okay.” Ryan shakes his head. This isn’t the time for this. But if Spencer says it is, it is. 

“He thinks you’re prettier than me.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want to be pretty.”

“You’re pretty, Spencer.”

“What about me?” Gerard asks groggily, stirring behind Ryan and flipping over to face Ryan’s back.

“Shut up, Gerard,” Ray mutters from the couch. He’s pouring over a textbook, a pencil getting lost in the mass of curls behind his ear.

“You’re pretty, too, Gerard,” Ryan murmurs. Gerard settles and closes his eyes again with a hum of content.

“What if he wants someone who wants to be pretty?” Spencer asks. 

Ryan sighs. “Don’t worry about it right now, Spencer. Are you okay?”

“I’m probably going to puke.”

“Do you need me to get you a bucket?”

“No, never mind,” Spencer’s voice falters, he clings to Ryan a little tighter, “are you going to hate me for going here?”

“No, Spencer.”

“Can I lie down?”

“You are lying down, Spencer.”

“On a bed or something.”

“You can have the couch if you can get up,” Ray says, and Ryan decides Ray is a trooper.

Spencer always babbles in that dissociative time after he comes down. Everything is always topsy-turvy for him the-morning-after. He wouldn’t know a good thing if it came up and slit his throat. 

Ray makes them all coffee, and Brendon picks them up by the time sunlight is streaming through the windows and getting caught in Ray’s hair. 

Ryan falls asleep in the back seat of Brendon’s hatchback even though he fights it so hard he’s gritting his teeth when he falls asleep, and the ten minutes between the dorms and Brendon’s house change something between Spencer and Brendon, he knows that much.

* * *

After that night, Spencer swears off anything harder than weed, he even stops drinking. (To be fair, he smokes a lot of weed in the interim, but Ryan’s happy). Ryan… mostly joins him in solidarity. He doesn’t have his pills anymore anyway. But it doesn’t mean he’s making any commitments. Spencer might be ready to do that, at least for now, but Ryan isn’t. He puts in two application forms that week; the first to Garden of the Gods Institute, the second for student loans. Both are accepted within the week. 

Ryan and Spencer go together to register Ryan for classes on Friday.  (Brendon offered to come, but his last shift at Smoothie Hut got extended, and he told them to go on without him.. Which relieved Ryan a lot; he’s been avoiding Brendon like the plague since the Bad Poet night.)

“Are you okay with lying?” Spencer asks, as they approach the schools’ main office.

“About what?” Ryan keeps his eyes on the ground. He tripped flat on his face not two minutes before. He pulls his scarf a little tighter.

“Being a demigod.”

Ryan just shrugs. 

“If it means I get to be with you, yeah. I’m okay with lying. I mean, Brendon doesn’t have any concrete powers like the lightning thing you do, I don’t know how anyone would find me out.”

“Do you think it would be a bad thing to move out of Brendon’s and stay in the dorms?”

Ryan blinks, looking forward, not letting himself process any reaction. He gives Spencer a warm smile. 

“No, if that’s what you want that’s what we’ll do, Spencer.” 

Ryan registers for every fashion course he can pack into the semester. They let him go all out. He could probably graduate in less than two years with the program they have set up if he didn’t get distracted by gender and sexuality studies.

(He overestimates his stress threshold a little, but that’s something he can handle later.)

They put in a dormitory application, too. It’s all too-easy and so friendly but Ryan doesn’t think twice about it because no one else seems to have any issues with the school. It’s hugely atypical of the process. He figures it’s the shoe-in thing. The gods want this to be… only psuedo school. Not too hard that all their kids can’t do it. It’s nice. Or maybe it’s lazy. 

They’re picking their way down the long sidewalk away from the office building when Ryan catches sight of a man crouched by the gutter, a satchel jutting out awkwardly at his hip. As they get closer, Ryan feels warmer, feels his muscles start to relax. Familiarity cradles his shoulders. He catches sight of the ball of fur at his fingertips at about the same time as he recognizes none other than Jon Walker. Ryan smirks, lowers his voice a fair bit, and shouts.

“Down on the ground, hands where I can see ‘em, drug dealer!”

Jon hits the ground in about no time flat, the cat he’d been crouched to pet looking both mildly confused and majorly annoyed at the interruption and stepping over Jon to walk lazily toward Ryan and Spencer and investigate the threat. Spencer looks about as confused as the cat.

“Dude, it’s okay, it’s just me,” Ryan calls out, trying to contain his laughter. Jon shoves himself up from the ground and looks around.

“Back here,” Spencer offers some direction for Jon to look. 

“Ryan Ross! How are you doing? Who’s this?” Jon says as soon as he catches sight of them. He walks up to where the cat has settled just out of Ryan’s reach (typical) and crouches down by the little calico again. She mews and butts her head against his hand.

“I’m good. This is Spencer Smith. My best friend,” Ryan says, then turning to Spencer, “Spence, this is Jon Walker,  he plays bass like a dream and sells weed.”

“Wait, I recognize you,” Spencer and Jon say, simultaneous enough to give them the opportunity to awkwardly laugh and wait for the other to speak while Ryan crouches to pet the cat.

“You drove us from Grand Junction!” Spencer exclaims, and Jon nods, excited. 

“I thought you two belonged here! Didn’t realize how right I was!” he responds, and he’s grinning at Spencer but he keeps glancing at Ryan. Ryan’s stomach sinks as he says the next thing, “Are you boys doing anything?” 

“Uh,” Spencer looks at Ryan while he says it, “I don’t think so.”

* * *

They end up going to Jon’s work. The one that isn’t being a drug dealer. He works at a coffee shop, Le Petit Chat, which is possibly the cutest, homiest place Ryan has ever been. It’s a small, blue-roofed shop which stands a quick walk from campus at one corner of a tiny plaza. It’s surrounded by leafy bushes and a garden on one side. There’s a cat sitting in the front window, tail lazily flicking in the sun.

Jon works with a guy named Andy Mrotek. He serves strong coffee with extra syrup and Jon gives him a tip as much as their orders. 

They sit in the window seat, by the white cat with a splash of color over one of her ears and drink coffee Jon bought for them, talking about anything and everything from Colorado Springs’ typical weather patterns to the parents they left behind in Las Vegas. 

Eventually, Ryan starts talking about a conversation he had with a sparrow a day or so back and stops mid-sentence when he realizes both Spencer and Jon are staring at him. 

“What?” he asks, slowly, unsure. 

“You talk to birds,” Spencer confirms.

“And they talk back?” Jon asks, his eyebrows raising half a milimeter. 

“I… guess not,” Ryan says, his lip twisting. He’s quiet for most of the rest of the conversation, only weighing in when they’ve finally finished their coffee and have gone to part ways. He wishes Jon the best, and gives him his number.  

By the time they leave, the sun is snagged like a balloon in the branches of the aspen stand across the street and the streets are golden with its dying light.

“You like him,” Spencer says, as soon as they’re out the door and down the block. 

“Do you have a cigarette?” Ryan asks.

“No, dude, start buying your own cigarettes,” Spencer says, then, after a pause just long enough to realize he shouldn’t let himself get side tracked if he wants a response, he repeats, “You like him.”

“Okay,” Ryan says, at the same time, in response to the former. He’d rather not respond to the second one.  He fishes six dollars and his ID out of his back pocket and ducks into the tiny grocery-convenience-corner store to buy himself a pack of Camel 99s and let Spencer stare after him, baffled and a little put-off before following him in for a fountain drink.

When they start walking again, Ryan’s pulling the foil from the mouth of the pack and shoving it in his pocket, flipping a lucky and pulling another out for himself, then offering one to Spencer who shakes his head.

“Ryan Ross, you can’t distract me from this. You like him.”

Ryan looks up at him while he lights his cigarette, eyebrows raised, but he doesn’t answer.

“Oh fuck you, Ryan, come on.”

“He makes any room feel like home,” Ryan says around the filter between his lips.

“He’s a Hestia divinitykid. I think they do that. It’s how Suave Suarez’ food is so good.”

“How do you know that?”

“Brendon’s talked about him.”

“Spencer, do you think I could be a demigod?” Ryan asks, looking forward.

“You’re human, though, Ryan. You’d know. Your dad would have told you. Or else weird shit would have tipped you off, right?”

“I really did talk to a sparrow the other night. The Infallible Law is too Infallible,” Ryan says.

“You could be deluding yourself,” it’s not angry, nor is it shocked. Spencer stops walking.

Ryan slows and turns around to face him, he shrugs.

“It talked to me. Quiet. Nothing special. Just chatter. It’s happened before. They don’t talk about much interesting, but. I dunno. They talk.”

“How high were you?”

“Not very? It happened. It definitely happened.”

“Huh.” Spencer starts walking again, scowling at the ground,“We could try to call up all the female gods and ask them if they left a kid in Vegas like eighteen years ago.”

“Okay,” Ryan says, he knows Spencer was joking, but it actually doesn’t seem like a bad plan.

They’re quiet for a long time, just walking, hands in their pockets. Spencer breaks the silence with a name. Nothing more. 

“Aphrodite,” falls from his lips like a glass bauble to the floor, it shatters and everything is suddenly clear. Whatever was trapped inside Ryan, waiting, wanting to be acknowledged, suddenly comes pouring through him. He can feel it in every beat of his pulse, something like gold, something like love, a thing he’s been so good at pretending he’s never known. And it’s standing right beside him, even if he never knew a mother or a father who loved him, even if he’s never fucked a person who could, his best friend is standing here with a name like love on his lips and Ryan feels like something, after all the years of things being wrong, is finally right. It cuts like glass. 

* * *

* * *

 

#### why do your eyes feel like shells in the dunes?

* * *

* * *

For the first time in years, Ryan Ross feels young and stupid and alive. 

Ryan has known Spencer since he was five years old and Spencer scraped his knee in front of Ryan’s house while Ryan was in the front yard pitching golf balls into the neighbors’ yard. In the entire time Spencer has known him, Ryan has always taken care of him. Following each of the three major things which affected Spencer negatively that Ryan did, he went through periods of self-repression and incredible guilt. (Getting kicked out {when he turned eighteen}, letting Spencer try a few of his pills {when he was fifteen, new at this, still clumsy at popping foil and swallowing dry}, and when he dumped every bad thing that had happened to him because if his family in Spencer’s lap. {when he was fifteen, before the drugs})

But whenever Ryan does something for Spencer, Ryan brims with determination, and if Spencer likes it, he fucking bursts at the seams. He’s also been exploring himself—in perhaps the most innocent, exhilarating way he ever has; Ryan has been playing with people. He’s stopped avoiding Brendon.

Brendon, coincidentally, is standing in the middle of the living room (the one closer to the back of the house that technically isn’t for anyone not strictly in the  with a towel around his waist and is dripping on the carpet. (Gabe also notes at a later date that you cannot tell how drunk Brendon is by his dripping on the carpet. Brendon is just kind of oblivious, Ryan guesses, or he’s too carefree to mind.) 

Gabe is standing in the doorway in neon purple briefs, three neon studded belts, a ridiculous feathered hat, and a pair of bright purple, sparkly, yellow-flower-strapped flip-flops. He has a blunt in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other and he looks like he either got done with a night of partying and rolled through the kitchen to beg his way into a cup of coffee from Nate, who was on kitchen shift, or who’d just rolled out of bed and decided to wear nothing but what he’d woken up in and what had been on or near his bed shortly thereafter. Ryan thinks it’s the latter because he also seems to have taken Will with him, who’s standing behind him like a zombie with coffee, bedhead, and enough clothing for the two of them. (His shirt, Gabe’s hoodie, wrinkled skinny jeans, and for some reason, gloves.)

Spencer is sat in the armchair in the rough middle of the room, and Ryan’s perched on the arm of his chair that Brendon isn’t dripping on. Spencer’s breaking down roaches to make a jenny joint, his hair freshly washed and much better dried than Brendon’s. Ryan has a hand absently petting his hair while he works and Ryan’s focusing on nothing with his eyes but everything with his brain. 

He’s paying attention to the emotions he feels in waves off of people, carefully tugging the feelings Brendon has in. 

(Ryan’s kind of been using Brendon as a test subject; a way to find his limits, carefully. He’s found he can’t touch, interact with, or clearly divine anything to do with non-romantisexual feelings, but he can identify their presence in a vague sort of way and reading body cues does the rest. This is something he’s been doing without thinking for quite some time: it’s just the less decent feelings that are any different)

 

It’s a little like a three-legged race of head and heart, he thinks it, feels it, he’s a little clumsy at first, but with some practice he pulls the strings, It’s okay. He does it slowly; subtly.

He started with the thoughts of himself (sometime just after Spencer and Ryan had gotten back and Ryan had thought about it it for a while), he pulled them back quelled as best he could, then he started putting the suggestions in his head, images and the vaguest sense of feeling, a slight push toward thoughts of Spencer. All of it’s suggestion really; Brendon obviously didn’t want to stop caring about Ryan, so Ryan let him care, some part of Brendon will probably always be attached to Ryan, some part of him might always have the lingering thought that Ryan is the one who got away. He’s not really sure. Ryan cares about Brendon on the basis that his best friend does so, and he’s not aware how much this will eventually change.

This morning, Ryan isn’t manipulating anything, nor suggesting it, the thought is there, should Brendon take it, Ryan thinks it’s best to let him draw his own conclusions. 

Gabe shuffles in, sprawling out onto the couch. Will follows him and sits between his legs, he pulls an ashtray toward them and lights a Slim. Brendon sits down next to them

“We need a,” Gabe is saying as his phone starts to ring in the pocket of the hoodie Will is wearing, “sign in sign out book so we know who’s in the house, Victoria just scared the crap out of me.” 

Gabe finishes his sentence and promptly answers the phone after rummaging around in Will’s pockets for a long minute. He promptly stands up and walks out of the room. 

Will just kind of frowns, shrugs, and leans back against the couch.

“Okay then,” Brendon says. His eyes flick to Spencer, then back. Spencer doesn’t notice, but Ryan does.

“So when are you guys moving to the dorms?” Will asks, staring at the ceiling, blowing a lazy smoke ring. Spencer lifts his head and straightens his shoulders a little to look at Will, then, for a second, Brendon (Brendon doesn’t notice, but Ryan does), and back to his work. 

“Next Saturday, I guess? We have to be in by eight AM it’s a drag,” Spencer is saying and Ryan nods along because it kind of is a fucking drag. Spencer closes his tin of roaches and finishes the joint, handing it to Ryan.

“You don’t have to go, you know that, right?” Brendon asks, and Spencer and he catch each other glancing at one another, look down. Ryan almost laughs as he begins attempting to light the joint.

“I think… I think it’d be nice to live the college life. A real college life. That doesn’t mean we won’t be here, like, every day of the week,” Spencer points out, “After all we’re totally members of the frat, right Will?”

“You haven’t gone through initiation,” Will says, with a snicker. Ryan doesn’t let Spencer ask what initiation is, he shoves the lit joint in his mouth and looks at Brendon. Brendon’s watching his hand. Good.

Pete appears in the door, then, muggy and obviously having been up all night, Andy’s on his heels (fresh and ready for the day, of course). Spotting the joint and coffee he waltzes in like he owns the place and steals Ryan’s cup.

“Hey do you guys know where Gabe is?” he asks, Andy sits down and nudges his arm for him to share some of Ryan’s coffee. 

Will lifts his head and grins while Brendon shoots off the couch to hug Pete. Spence passes to him somewhere in the middle of the hug. 

“He just stepped out, took a call,” Will says.

“Damn it,” Pete says. He looks at Ryan, “Hey Ry.”

Ryan kind of blinks. “Yeah?”

“My dad said your mom wanted to talk. She wants to claim you. For real.”

(Ryan has to ask what claiming is later; it’s a certification process for demigods, kind of, a way of saying a demigod is in good, proper, confirmed status with their parent and that their parent is backing them and their actions. Ryan kind of hates that it gets a proper title to be a decent parent to the person you kind of forced into the world, but he gets it.)

* * *

Ryan wakes up at dark o’clock that night (or the next morning, he can’t really tell). The air is still and cool and everything is quiet. The window to his room is cracked, and he can smell the evergreens across the street. He reaches groggily for his phone. He’s going to message Spencer when he hears a faint snore from the next room over.

He doesn’t want to wake him up.

He texts Jon and Pete instead, the same message. 

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ Hey. You up?  _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

He puts his phone down. Closes his eyes, crosses his hands over his chest. He briefly pretends he's dead. It doesn’t help him get back to sleep. He lays there with his eyes closed thinking about Sparrows and about what everyone else is dreaming and wondering if this is how Pete feels when he’s reading other peoples’ dreams.

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

It takes fifteen minutes before Pete texts back

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ on brk. so up, gross. 3 more hours in hellmart. menthols r gross _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

To which Ryan replies, 

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ Tell Suarez that, Good luck dude. Kick some contemporary, conforming, capitalist ass, Wentz. _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

To which Pete says, 

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ im like 2/4 of those things u just said. going in. thx. xoxoxo _

Ryan doesn’t respond because his phone is suddenly alerting him to the fact Jon texted.

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ i am now :{)} _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Ryan blearily smiles at the screen. 

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ Did I wake you up? _

It’s only a second before Jon responds;

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ maybe a little. are you okay? _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_Yeah, I’m good_ , Ryan taps out, then deletes it, settles on;

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ I don’t know. I can’t sleep. _

_ do you like cats? _

_ What? _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ i’m cat-sitting. you should come over. you can sleep with the cat. _

Ryan takes a long time to process what he was just invited to do, and in that process, after a long pause, he receives another message. 

 

_ or with me haha _

 

_ or both. _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Ryan raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t want to agree to this but he wants to agree to this, one part of him says that this will ruin everything. The other says that it will make or break it. And the chance to make it means more than the chance of burning wreckage.

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ Okay. Address? _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Once Jon sends it, Ryan puts on a long coat and grabs a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and some weed and his keys and phone and all the other little necessary things. 

He texts him a quick ‘ _xoxo_ ’ and waits for a response.

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ the real question is, ryan, will you snuggle me or the cat more? _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_ Probably the cat. _

_ damn. will you let me snuggle you while you snuggle the cat? _

_ Maybe I will, Maybe I won’t. Best behavior, jon Walker. Do you have a pipe? _

_ of course. :{)}  _

_ On my way. :) _

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Ryan’s making his way to the door of Jon’s little apartment for the first time and everything is sharpening itself down to this one moment. (The way Ryan will recall it, years later, is ‘quiet, soft, every step toward the door was kind of like the anticipation before a hug, nice, I guess.’.)

The welcome mat says ‘welcome, come inside’. The door is red. When Ryan puts his hand on it it feels like there’s a fire behind it and he hears a little almost-yelp from inside, a thump, and the heat’s gone. 

Jon Walker answers the door before Ryan even knocks, from his knees like he’s just fallen over. He levies himself up and Ryan lets his eyes skate over him. He’s in  a navy hoodie (bleach stains on the shoulder, white specks at the lower hem) and a pair of pajama bottoms and he’s got rosey cheeks and bags under his eyes and bedhead and a groggy smile. He wears it all spectacularly.

Jon is opening his mouth to say hello, when Ryan slides up against him, his step forward taking them both back a step into Jon’s apartment (a wave of relief hits him, crashes over his head like a broken fucking bottle, this is the best place Ryan has ever been) he presses their chests together and feels his heart beat, feels it, really feels it for the first time in years.

(The last time Ryan felt his heartbeat, he was six years old, pitching golf balls into the neighbors’ yard.)

When Ryan keeps pressing forward he’s tilting head and as soon as their lips touch, catch for a second, Jon is grumbling and pushing at him a little. 

Ryan springs back, eyes wide (he knows he’s fucked up) and muscles as taut as they can be here. 

Jon steps past him, closing the door squarely in front of a brown tabby’s nose and toe-ing the big bundle of fur away from the door. He chuckles, looking back at Ryan helplessly. (Relief hits him a little less hard and sudden this time.)

“I can’t let him out,” he murmurs, sheepish, “I’m giving him ear drops and I don’t want his ears getting dirty.” He pauses, then adds, “Hey.”

Ryan smirks, raising his eyebrows and nodding in a way that says ‘hey’ right back. “You, Jon Walker,” he practically fucking purrs (usually this is where he turns his brain off, it won’t go off, he doesn’t want it to), “Are the first person who I will ever kiss directly after they tell me about ear drops. Feline or otherwise.”

Jon is smiling, and there’s an edge of nervousness (excitement?) behind his eyes. He feels the fluttering in his chest from across the half foot between them. He wonders if it’s divinity or if Jon’s heart is really beating that fast and loud. (Ryan’s sounds like the ocean at high tide crashing against his ears.)

Jon’s the one to bridge the gap, slip an arm around Ryan’s waist, pull him close, and Ryan’s the one to reconnect the kiss. He stops holding back the wall of seafoam rising in his throat and veins and feels Jon stiffen, then relax as, presumably, the intense ‘want want want love care care care fucking fuck jon fucking walker’ feeling finds him, too.

Ryan’s hands fist in the back of Jon’s shirt, and his lips catch Jon’s bottom one. He nips, gentle, not enough for any pain (he doesn’t need to gauge Jon’s reaction; Jon doesn’t feel like the type who wants to be hurt) but enough to put the pressure there, and there it is, Jon’s lower lip drops a millimeter and Ryan takes his chance.

The sound Jon makes is somewhere ranked above any of the best sounds Ryan has ever heard. It’s a low, gentle sound which coincides with a tightening of the arm around Ryan’s waist and it goes straight to Ryan’s head. He’s suddenly dizzy in the best way possible.

He lets the rest of his body press into Jon, moves his hips gentle against Jon’s, pulling his lower lip into his mouth. When Jon makes the sound again, Ryan’s coming undone. He doesn’t stop sucking until he presses a thigh between Jon’s legs and finds him hard. Ryan rolls his whole body into Jon, then, producing a much louder, half-dismayed groan. Ryan smirks, letting Jon’s lip go.

Jon rolls his eyes and places a quick, wet kiss to the corner of Ryan’s mouth. 

“Okay?” he asks.

Ryan raises his eyebrows and tries not to laugh while he adjusts his thigh against Jon Walker’s pants. Jon half-whimpers half-groans and brings a hand up to scrub his face. 

“Why are you doing this to me, Ryan?” he asks from behind the hand, breath starting to come in stops and starts. 

“Because,” Ryan says, pushing just a little closer and sneaking a hand under Jon’s shirt, running up the skin of his back gently, “You’re attractive and I want to.” He lets that feeling coat his voice, the pull of Aphrodite, his DNA is stacked for this. Ryan was made for this.

“If I go to hell, will you come with me?” Jon murmurs, and Ryan rolls his eyes, fitting his lips to that spot under Jon’s jaw, the one he’d scouted the first time he saw him up close.

Jon splutters, and keeps trying to talk, “You came to sleep?”

“Later,” Ryan murmurs into Jon’s neck. He presses teeth against his neck for a second, lets his tongue flick out and taste him. He’s too busy thinking about Jon to think too hard about what Jon just said, it takes a minute for it to fully comprehend. Then Ryan jerks up, a kind of terror filling his eyes.

“Wait. Fuck. Are you okay with this?” he asks, eyes dead serious. Jon gives him this look that says ‘yes yes yes’, but he says, instead, 

“I’m. Why? Why are you doing this Ryan?”

Ryan pulls back a bit, withdraws his thigh half an inch. Jon almost whimpers, he catches himself, Ryan conceals his smile just a little. 

“Because, Jon Walker, I’ve been in fucking love with you since I walked through the door at Bad Poet.”

(And Ryan knows that telling someone you’re in love with them on the first date {is that what this is? they’ve never done anything just them, they’ve gone to Bad Poet twice since, more or less together, but Ryan doesn’t count that} is widely regarded as a really crappy move, but Ryan frankly doesn’t care, because the looks in their eyes are mirrored; they’re young and in love and nothing can stop them now. Nothing ever will. Ryan is confident in that.)

Jon grabs Ryan’s free hand, laces the fingers.

“Come to bed?" ___________  
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Ryan smiles. “Okay.”

Jon’s bedroom is tiny; a queen size mattress is shoved into the far corner, and it extends over half of the room longways and just under half across. His walls are covered in more band posters than Ryan’s were in high school and between the book shelf, bedside table, huge window (below them the street is beginning to wake up), and the open closet door, it’s ‘cozy’ to the extreme. Ryan can’t help but kind of fall in love with it. As soon as they’re through the door, Ryan undoes his jacket and hangs it on the doorknob, liberating himself from the wrinkled button up he’s been wearing since about this time yesterday morning, and kicks off his shoes. 

Jon just sits on the edge of the bed, petting the tabby. He’s wearing a half-smile that looks gorgeous on him, and his eyes are sliding up and down Ryan in a way that Ryan would detest on anyone else, he might detest it a little on Jon too if he wasn’t wearing the literal most mystified expression. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ryan says, voice warm to show he doesn’t mean it, and more serious when he adds, “You’re not too bad yourself.”

Jon laughs and goes a shade of pink Ryan couldn’t love more. Ryan slips over to him, nudging one knee between Jon’s legs, spreading them enough to set it down on the edge of the bed between Jon’s thighs, and the other on the opposite side of his hip. Ryan grins as Jon falls back The cat startles as Ryan leans forward and flees. (Thank god, Ryan’s really not sure what the protocol for getting friendly with a cat in the near vicinity is.)

Jon’s hand is at his back in a moment, sliding gently, like he’s steadying Ryan against him. Maybe he is.

Ryan leans down to suck at Jon’s neck and Ryan’s just about to pull harder when Jon groans, hips bucking up against Ryan’s leg.

“Marks,” Jon half-gasps, and as best he can, “Work. Not good. Don’t look good in scarves.”

Ryan grins, leaning in and putting every ounce of seduction he can into his voice, “You will look fucking amazing in scarves, Jon Walker. You will rock the fuck out of scarves for a week after I’m done.”

Jon’s hips jerk and catch again, he looks up at Ryan with this pitiful ‘you know what you’re fucking doing’ look. Ryan feels his dick twitch at the way Jon’s lips are just millimeters apart but his breath is rattling in and out and his pupils are blown in that way that says ‘want’ and not ‘broken’.

Ryan shoves his hands into Jon’s shirt, and Jon yelps. Ryan can’t help but laugh.

“Your hands are fucking freezing!” Jon almost-wails. The ‘pity me’ look gets more intense.

“Welcome to having a skinny boyfriend.” Ryan smirks down at him, shoving his hands under Jon’s waistband to his thighs. Jon squeals, grabbing at Ryan’s wrists. Ryan doesn’t budge, laughing, and Jon’s laughing too as Ryan’s hands warm up and then they start stroking at his thighs and Jon loses the capability to form words again. Jon’s laughs become a ragged, hitched breath, and then an ongoing soft murmur of swears and groans as Ryan gently brushes his fingers up Jon’s thighs. Jon’s hands don’t stop moving at Ryan’s back, one finding the place his hair meets his neck, the other playing in the dip of his spine.

When Ryan gets to Jon’s dick, he runs a thumb over the head, and then keeps traveling upward, and Jon practically whines like a dog. (Ryan is momentarily reminded of the way Brendon cocks his head, a thought which very quickly leaves because Jon fucking Walker is squirming on the bed below him, practically begging to be touched.) 

“Want something, Jon?” Ryan’s, murmuring, his hands finding Jon’s hips, bringing them against his leg, pushing Jon to roll up against him. Jon happily complies, meeting Ryan’s eyes again, breath drying the saliva at his bottom lip in soft, quick little huffs. 

“Ah. Ah. Fuck,” Jon manages, and Ryan laughs, kissing up his neck. Ryan doesn’t wait for him to finish, catches his lips, slips his tongue inside and feels their teeth click. Neither of them mind. Jon’s hand holds Ryan close into the kiss. 

Ryan’s hand pulls Jon’s pajama bottoms down just far enough to let his hand at Jon’s cock. The sound Jon makes when Ryan slides his hand to cup around his head and just rub is probably the sound Ryan will jerk off to for the entirety of the rest of his life. Jon pulls Ryan heavier into the kiss, moans pushing into his lips and tongue, his hips jumping against Ryan. Ryan’s already pulling him apart and he knows it, takes every movement slow while Jon comes undone under him. 

Then Jon’s hand finds Ryan’s hip and Ryan groans and jerks forward, bringing his jean-trapped hard-on down across his hand and Jon’s naked one. Ryan gasps, stops his movements, bites Jon’s lip hard enough to sting. Jon’s hips jerk up, pushing them together again. (Ryan entertains the thought off grinding against Jon like this til they’re both too desperate to care that both of them would definitely cum all over Ryan’s {stupid anyway not worth cockblocking him} jeans.)

He grabs at his own zipper, undoing his button after he’s got it down and shoving his boxers and jeans down, groans and lets his forehead fall to Jon’s shoulder when he grinds down against Jon and feels Jon’s hips push up to meet his. Ryan gasps again when he feels Jon’s mouth on his neck, sucking hard enough to leave a mark (in the mirror the next day when they’re examining themselves, Jon will point at the purple splotch and say ‘payback’). 

Ryan kind of can’t take it, after that. He drops his hand to wrap around both of their cocks, lets himself thrust while he does his best to watch Jon’s every move and expression (it’s difficult considering Jon’s taken up kissing down his shoulder.) and his hand starts fast and only gets faster, working them together.

Jon’s breath goes erratic the same second Ryan’s does. They both lose the rhythmic breath they had before and their hips knock hard at least once, but neither of them can be assed to care. Heat is flooding their veins and drowning their lungs in a kind of passion Ryan has never known, and Jon has only just discovered.

“Fuck,” Jon is repeating under his breath and Ryan catches his lips just after he says his name, it makes both of them speed up, and every nerve ending in Ryan’s body is starting to melt and it’s all trickling down to the heat at his cock, he can’t stop himself from gasping Jon’s name at his lips (three times) and he works them both faster. Jon’s trembling underneath him.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” they murmur it together, look at each other, almost laugh, but before they have the chance they’re swept away by it and Ryan can’t help it, all the little power, all the suggestion is seeping from him at the seams and he can feel Jon practically quaking every time another wave of it gets over him, and then Ryan’s vision starts to blur, his lungs start to almost-burn. 

“Gonna,” Ryan murmurs, and Jon groans, looking him straight in the fucking eyes. Then Jon’s eyes snap shut, his teeth find his lip, then he scrambles to pull Ryan into the most desperate kiss Ryan has ever had. Ryan cums across Jon’s stomach with a gasp and it feels like a hurricane is trying to open up his chest. Jon’s cum ends up on Ryan’s hip trailing down to his boxers and (almost to his delight) on the waistband of his jeans moments later..

“I’m in love with you, Jon Walker,” Ryan breathes in the interim between the climax and the part where he stands and shrugs himself out of his pants as best he can, because Jon makes him want to tell the truth, and be passionately open with everything that smashes against his ribcage.

When Ryan finally does get up to work his pants down and to the floor, he helps Jon with his, too, and they look at each other, straight in the eye. No holds barred. No shame.

“I’m in love with you, too, Ry.”

Jon climbs into the unmade bed and shoves over to the wall, and Ryan raises his eyebrows, then wiggles himself into bed beside Jon, and maneuvers himself over Jon to fit into the tiny place between Jon and the wall. Jon chuckles. 

They don’t talk a lot, in the fifteen minutes before they’re both asleep. (Jon falls asleep murmuring that ‘things are shaping up to be pretty odd’) But Ryan listens to every breath Jon breathes, and he feels his heartbeat in his wrist against where it crosses over Jon’s. Ryan has never been more scared to be alone.

(Ryan doesn’t tell Jon about anything that happened prior to them meeting, not until he’s asked, he doesn’t need to. Ryan doesn’t ever chronicle the stories of his drunk father, or of Spencer, his perfect, best, smartest, cutest best friend never knowing the right thing to say. He doesn’t need to. The second they wake up at noon, they’re alive. They’re together. Ryan lets himself press his face into Jon’s hoodie for a full hour before they rouse themselves from bed. They make coffee and pet the cat and share kisses and from that moment Ryan and Jon become Ryan-and-Jon. Nothing ever felt so natural. Ryan’s never felt so at home.)

___________ever felt so at home.)_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

* * *

 

* * *

 

 

####  _**:epilogue:** _

#### call it home

* * *

* * *

 

_february 2008_

“Ryan, you’re up,” Pete’s saying, and Ryan really doesn’t want to untangle himself from Jon. It’s thirty-three degrees fahrenheit and the rain is coming down like it’s the end of the world outside of This Ain’t A Scene. Brendon’s stepping down from the stage, a sway in his step a touch more exaggerated than the rest of his walking. (Ryan is 99% sure he got laid sometime between Brendon, Jon, Spencer, and Ryan going out for coffee and a night on the town the night before and them all meeting up at Andy’s part of the co-op at around noon. To be fair, they all probably did.)

Brendon’s just finished a poem entitled Bittersweet. He sits on the other side of Spencer from Ryan as Ryan slowly unclasps his hands from Jon’s and tries to convince himself to drag the jacket over both their laps off his knees. Jon does it for him, and gives him the folded piece of paper out of the pocket. 

Ryan kisses his cheeks, breathes in. In the five and a half months he’s been going to Bad Poet, he has not read any poetry there. He’s anxious. The smell of water (new rain meets old dust) is filling the room. The windowsill has a halo of scattered bouncing rain fogging it from the bottom. 

Ryan makes his way up to the stage. 

“Hey guys,” he says to the crowd, who look bigger from the stage, somehow. His eyes catch Gerard’s (skate his face where the bruise he gave him months ago has healed), and Frank’s (his brother’s boyfriend), and then Mikey’s. Pete’s watching him from stage left. The new kid, ginger, is sitting as close to stage left as he can, Andy shoots him a thumbs up from the door perch he always seems to occupy. 

“You don’t know me great, not yet,” he’s saying before he even knows why, “But you know me better than anyone in my life ever has.” He catches Spencer’s eyes, “Spencer, of course, you’re the exception. You always are.” He says it with all the affection in his voice he could ever have. (Spencer is almost as easy as Jon.)

Spencer grins, Ryan watches his hand snake the inside of Brendon’s knee. 

“Yeah, yeah, stop stalling, Ross,” he shouts, just as affectionately. 

Ryan sighs, continues on. 

“I guess,” he says, quiet into the mic, “I just want to thank you. For this opportunity. Pete, thank you so fucking much, Brendon,” he pauses, gives Brendon a look full of everything (relief, gratefulness, affection), “Jon, Spencer, Andy, everyone, fuck. Just. Thank you.”

Spencer rolls his eyes. 

“You gonna stop any time soon?”

“Yeah,” Ryan takes a deep breath, unfolds his paper, “Working title is ‘This Is Why I Walk To The Ocean.” One more deep breath and he can’t put it off any more so he pushes the words from his rib cage to his teeth with his tongue. 

“If all our life is but a dream,” he starts, voice cracking, “fantastic posing greed, then we should feed our jewelry to the sea.” His eyes flick up to Brendon, Spencer, and Jon. He smiles a tiny, almost-shy smile. (This is the first time they’ve heard it.)

“Diamonds do appear, just like broken glass to me; genius only comes along in storms of foreign fabled tongues,” he’s saying and he’s trying to make his voice catch the poetry like Pete does but he knows he’s not as good at it (and he almost knows that’s okay).

“Tripping eyes,” his gaze finds Gerard, and then Spencer, “and flooded lungs.”

“Northern downpour sends its love,” Ryan half-whispers into the mic, letting his eyes find Jon from under the brim of his news boy cap, “Hey moon, please forget to fall down.”

The poem gets him through, when he makes it to ‘I know the world’s a broken bone’, his voice is half-hoarse with tears which aren’t ever going to actually fall.

“So melt your fucking headaches,” he’s almost-whispering into the mic again, “Call it _home_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for sticking with us through the first issue of Any Failing Empire. It's been a hot and bothered four days; and looking back we're still kind of appalled that it only took that long to punch down 21,000+ words of almost-decent writing.
> 
> *For those wondering, Pete's poem is an amalgam of excerpts from Gray, Pete Wentz' novel. (As of September, 2007, when the majority of this story takes place, Pete hasn't met Patrick yet.) Ryan's poem is a (slightly edited) rendition of Northern Downpour under a different title (a title swiped from one of his livejournal entries). 
> 
> *a "jenny joint" is a "generational joint", made from the ends of a bunch of other joints. Most people throw away their roaches, but poor college kids and a lot of people who know their shit keep the ends in some sort of tin to make jenny joints with. 
> 
> *As I haven't been to Colorado Springs in more than a year, I claim no geographical accuracy besides that gained from knowing the mountains are west and Garden of the Gods is kinda sort of over there. [Edit as of 7/4/2016, I lived in Colorado springs for 6 months at the end of 2015. I haven't spotted any inaccuracies yet, but this will be corrected in further issues if I do]
> 
> So, thank you for reading! Stay tuned for Gerard's origin issue. The first part will likely be up sometime in the next week.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a(/n almost) completely unedited 10.6k words which make up only half (maybe less!) of a universe which will have so much more; this is Ryan's origin story, issue 001 if you will. It's been written in no less than fifteen hours, and due to that, I suggest you read with a grain of salt. Friendships, and often relationships, are hazy here; these are the Lost Boys of the rocky mountains, none of them know what they're doing. Whatever you're expecting, you're likely to find it. (unless it's good writing, I'm so bad at that)
> 
> Please stay tuned for Part II, and for other installments in this series! I can't wait to explore this universe fully. If you have questions, comments, or anything, please don't hesitate to speak up! Even if it's criticism! I live off people talking about my writing, seriously. 
> 
> Thanks for reading the first half of Any Failing Empire - Maybe I Will, Maybe I Won't.  
> (I'm pouring out my heart for paper)
> 
> -Reggie (big thanks to frankie who helped with details and my good friend ry who divulged in pre-planning with me)  
> \--  
> edit (morning of 12/10/2014): just wanted to mention for posterity's sake that the general... 'black out'-age of the actual act of doing drugs, drinking alcohol, and, sometimes, having sex are things not that i'm afraid to write about, but things that the focal character of this issue, ryan, has distanced himself from thinking about; he's intentionally desensitized himself to it and de-prioritized it in his head because they're too big of a problem for him to deal with in the present and he doesn't feel like he has the 'luxury' of thinking long term. (at least, in his current state) there are exceptions (social drinking, pot, etc) that he feels more comfortable with, but for the most part, choosing not to detail the precise actions going into it is a stylistic choice to magnify the effect of the 'distanced' feeling. thx.


End file.
